Projects
The Baturyn Project: Report for 2008
The year 2008 marked the 300th anniversary of the “Baturyn tragedy” ― the sack of hetman Ivan Mazepa’s capital by the Russian troops on 2-4 November 1709.
Presently, the “old Baturyn” site is the place of the on-going archeological excavations, financed in part by the Kowalsky Program for the Study of Eastern Ukraine (CIUS), and the reconstruction works, done under the patronage of the President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko. The article, Розкопки у Батурині 2008 р. та відзначення 300-ліття Батуринської трагедії (in Ukrainian), provides abundant information about “Baturyn project” and contains numerous pictures, related to this town’s past and present.
Acknowledgement: The Kowalsky Program for the Study of Eastern Ukraine expresses gratitude to the board members of Homin Ukraїny newspaper, who granted their permission to introduce this article on our program’s site (the article was originally published in Homin Ukraїny, №10 (3304), 10 March 2009).
Baturyn, early 1700s (reconstruction)
The Baturyn Project: Report for 2007
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In August, the Canada-Ukraine archaeological expedition conducted its annual excavations in Baturyn, Chernihiv oblast’. This project is sponsored by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (Kowalsky Programme for the Study of Eastern Ukraine), the Shevchenko Scientific Society of America (Anton Savyts’kyi Fund), and the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (PIMS) in Toronto. In 2007, CIUS also granted a subsidy from its Marusia Onyshchuk and Ivanko Kharuk Memorial Endowment Fund. Prof. Zenon Kohut, Director of CIUS as well as the Kowalsky Programme, is the patron of and academic adviser to this project. All of its participants deeply thank CIUS for prestigious sponsorship and generous and stable funding of the Baturyn’s historical and archaeological research since 2001.
Unfortunately, for the last two years, the Hetman Capital Charitable Fund initiated by the Ukrainian President provided no funds for the Baturyn digs. This caused a considerable budget cut in the expedition personnel and by extension limited the scale of our excavations in 2007 (almost to 50%, comparing to its maximum extent in 2005 following the Orange Revolution).
Last summer, about 86 students and scholars from the universities and museums of Chernihiv, Kyiv, Hlukhiv, Baturyn, Rivno, and Chernivtsi took part in the digs. Dr. Volodymyr Kovalenko, University of Chernihiv, directs the expedition. Dr. Volodymyr Mezentsev (University of Toronto, CIUS) and Prof. Martin Dimnik (PIMS) participate in this project and publication and advertising of its research results.
In 1669, Baturyn became the capital of the Cossack Hetman state and one of the large and prosperous towns in early modern Ukraine. Its population supported the insurrection headed by Hetman Ivan Mazepa (1687-1708) against Muscovite rule over central Ukraine in 1708. The tsarist troops suppressed this rebellion with terror, ravaging Baturyn to the ground and annihilating its garrison of 6-7,000 and as many civil inhabitants.
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The 2007 excavation’s findings have corroborated the view that this town emerged from a fortress built by Chernihiv princes in the late 11th century. Archaeologists uncovered remnants of the burned 17-18th-century dwellings and several skeletons of victims of the 1708 massacre. They also unearthed a new portion of foundations of the ruined Mazepa’s country villa (ca. 1700).
The team excavated eastern and central parts of footings of the brick Holy Trinity Cathedral (1690-92). This main church of the hetman capital was pillaged and burned during its fall. It represented a Baroque three-naved basilica with three altar apses and probably seven domes. The lateral apses were reinforced by two buttresses. The church had some 24 m. in width and was one of the largest in the Cossack state. Hetmans transplanted the domed basilica’s design from the Catholic Baroque architecture, specifically that of Vilnius, Lithuania, and adopted it to the Ukrainian Orthodox tradition in 1670-90s.
The famous cathedral of the Holy Trinity Monastery in Chernihiv (1679-95) served as a model for the main Baturyn’s church. It also borrowed some architectural forms (shallow apses) from the contemporaneous distinguished basilical cathedrals of Epiphany (1690-93) and St. Nicholas (1690-96) in Kyiv. In the naos’ centre under the ground floor of the Baturyn church, the remnants of looted burial crypt with remains of a dignitary from Mazepa’s era had been discovered.
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In the fortress and citadel’s sites, the investigators have found eight silver coins of the Polish King Sigismund III (1587-1632), a billon neck cross with the Crucifixion, a woman dress’ ornament wattled of silver wires with beads, a silver ball pendant or button with engraved pattern, a bronze palmette applique of a belt, iron tongs and a weight, a fragment of a decorative polished bone plate with carved plant motif, a cast gilt brass surmount of a hilt of costly sabre or broadsword fashioned in the shape of stylized lion head (likely Western import), iron sabre’s cross-guard and spurs, lead musket bullets (relics of the military actions in 1708), fragmented stove ceramic tiles, some with reliefs of a mounted armed Cossack and a knight as well as a man in the European Baroque clothes and footwear (accomplished by local artisans in the distinctive folk style), of the 17-18th centuries.
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The 2007 excavations in Baturyn have yielded new significant archaeological materials for reconstructing the socio-economic and cultural development of this centre of the Cossack polity. They have shown the lively local crafts, Western/Central European trade contacts and stimulating Baroque influences on the masonry architecture and ceramic decorations of the hetman capital. For the first time, remnants of Baturyn’s destroyed Baroque church have been archaeologically extensively explored.
The Canada-Ukraine expedition intends to renew its field research at Baturyn in the summer of 2008. For further information regarding this project please contact the author of the report (tel.: 416-766-1408; email: v.mezentsev@utoronto.ca).
Volodymyr Mezentsev, Ph. D. (University of Toronto and CIUS)
Historical Dictionary Completed
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Compiling an up-to-date English-language historical dictionary of Ukraine has been a long-term project of the Kowalsky program’s Edmonton operation. Co-authored by Myroslav Yurkevich (who also spearheaded the project), Zenon E. Kohut, and Bohdan Y. Nebesio, with the assistance of Lada Bassa and Tetiana Narozhna, the "Historical Dictionary of Ukraine’ will be over 800 pages long. In addition to the entries, the dictionary includes an introduction, chronology, extensive bibliography, and maps. The manuscript has been approved, with suggested revisions, by the editor of the series. The Dictionary team is currently working on updating some entries, increasing the number of entries on contemporary Ukraine, and formatting the text according to the publisher’s requirements. The final text has been submitted to the publisher, Scarecrow Press, with publication expected in the summer of 2005. Scarecrow Press, based in Lanham, MD, is very well established as a publisher of reference works, and its Historical Dictionaries seres is acquired by libraries throughout the world.
UPDATE: This publication can now be purchased online from Scarecrow Press.