ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH OF MAZEPA’S CAPITAL BATURYN IN 2013-2014
Volodymyr Mezentsev, Ph. D.
CIUS, Toronto
On November 13th, Ukraine commemorated the anniversary of the destruction of Baturyn, Chernihiv Oblast, by Russian forces in 1708. Like every year, the Baturyn National Historical and Cultural Preserve organized mass meetings, concerts, and memorial services for victims of this tragedy in the town. The local state administration, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyivan Patriarchate, professors and students from the Chernihiv National University who study Baturyn’s antiquities, Cossack organizations, the media, town residents, and guests took part in this solemn commemoration.
In 2013-14, Canadian and Ukrainian archaeologists and historians continued their annual summer excavations in Baturyn. Prof. Zenon Kohut, the leading historian of the Hetman state and former director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) at the University of Alberta, heads this project.
Last year, nearly 70 students and scholars from the universities of Chernihiv, Hlukhiv, and Sumy, as well as the Kyiv Mohyla Academy National University participated in the Baturyn archaeological expedition. Archaeologists Yurii Sytyi and Dr. Viacheslav Skorokhod of the Chernihiv University led this expedition. Dr. Volodymyr Mezentsev (CIUS, Toronto) is its Canadian co-director and the Baturyn project coordinator. Renowned historian of Kyivan Rus’, Prof. Martin Dimnik of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto, also takes part in the research of Baturyn and the dissemination of its findings in North America and Ukraine.
Between 1669 and 1708, this town was the capital of the Cossack state that achieved prominence under the dynamic leadership of Hetman Ivan Mazepa (1687-1709). Baturyn’s fortunes were cut short during the suppression of Mazepa’s revolt for liberation of central Ukraine from the increasing power of Moscow. In 1708, Russian troops stormed the hetman capital and looted and burned it to the ground. They slaughtered to a man 11,000-14,000 captive Cossacks and unarmed burghers as a massive punitive measure ordered by Tsar Peter I. The town lay in ruins and remained primarily deserted for half a century until it was rebuilt by Hetman Kyrylo Rozumovskyi (1750-64).
In 2013, excavations were mainly carried out in the Baturyn suburb of Honcharivka. Before 1700, Mazepa constructed a richly embellished three-story masonry palace there, which was destroyed by Muscovite forces in 1708. A rampart with bulwarks and a moat protected the Hetman’s principal residence on the field side, while a palisade stretched along the high bank of the adjacent Seim River. Footings of these wooden fortifications were uncovered by archaeologists.
An examination of bricks from the semi-columns, as well as fragments of the limestone Corinthian capitals and figured ceramic bases of the palace, has determined that these order elements were initially painted with red ochre. The rest of the facades were plastered and whitewashed. This combination of colours was likely borrowed from the ornamentation of the Renaissance and baroque architecture of Central Europe. In Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, and Germany some early modern palaces, villas, castles, city halls, universities, churches, monasteries, and residential houses feature whitewashed elevations articulated with bright red vertical and/or horizontal projecting decorative details, usually pilasters or columns. Prior to 1708, the red order elements and the entire exterior of Mazepa’s palace were covered with a layer of lime, as was typical of other monumental structures in the Hetmanate.
The floors in Mazepa’s residence, were paved with ornate ceramic tiles of several geometric forms. Many of them were faced with green and blue glazing, while others were just plain terracotta. The author and Serhii Dmytriienko (Chernihiv), the Baturyn archaeological expedition’s graphic artist, conducted a detailed examination of the numerous fragments of tiles found during the palace excavations. We prepared hypothetical computer reconstructions of nine complete tiles of varying shapes and ornamentations, as well as an equal number of floor pavement designs of the palace’s reception halls, living quarters, and office premises. By extension, this suggests that Mazepa’s residence had at least nine rooms, halls, vestibules, corridors, storage areas, and the like.
Ceramic floor tiles discovered in some churches and monasteries of Kyiv, Chernihiv, Hlukhiv, Baturyn, and other towns of the Cossack realm are different in formats, adornments, and settings. The 16th-18th – century castle of the Ostrozky princes in the town of Ostroh, Rivne Oblast, however, used the same combination of elongated six-angled and square glazed floor tiles as in the Honcharivka palace. The floor chess pattern which has been discovered and reconstructed in the latter was widely employed in palaces, basilicas, and monasteries in Ukraine, Poland, Italy, and other European countries. It is represented in the images of interiors of many secular and ecclesiastical buildings found in Ukrainian baroque engravings and icons. Original 16th-18th – century checkered floor inlays have been preserved at the residences of Polish kings on Wawel Hill in Krakow and the Wilanow district of Warsaw (1677). Of all the known architectural monuments of early modern Ukraine, Mazepa’s main residence in Baturyn stands out for the largest number, variety, and distinctive features of the decorative types of glazed monochrome and terracotta floor tiles uncovered there. This attests to its comparatively large size, multistoried and multi-chamber architectural design, and exceptional embellishment.
Our expedition continued to excavate the remnants of a spacious service structure (19 by 5 metres) of the early 18th century located at the hetman’s court in Honcharivka. It had a wooden post-and-beam (in German: fachwerk) construction design, which was extensively employed in urban and rural dwellings throughout medieval and early modern Europe, from Britain to western Ukraine. The majority of buildings in 17th-18th – century Lviv were of fachwerk design. In North America, private residences using such construction type are known as “Tudor style timber-framed houses”. A fachwerk structure could fit well with the Central European baroque style of Mazepa’s palace.
Artefacts unearthed during the 2011-14 excavations give me grounds to surmise that this sizeable service structure housed either Cossack officers (starshyna), members of the hetman guard (serdiuky), adjutants, and/or clerks working within Mazepa’s private quarters or for state institutions at his court. Last year, at this site, were found: 14 silver Polish and Russian coins, a silver pendant with a relief plant pattern, a round dress ornament with a rock crystal, a silver wire earring with a glass bead, four broken silver decorative plates, three bronze clasps and four figured appliqués with relief patterns, engravings, and incrustations which adorned the costly leather belts of officers, four plain iron clasps from the belts of ordinary Cossacks, a copper wedding ring, 10 lead musket bullets, a bronze screw and flint from a rifle, a splinter from an iron cannonball or grenade, an iron arrowhead of local manufacture, and many shards of ceramic glazed multicoloured and terracotta stove tiles (kakhli) produced conceivably by skilled artisans summoned to Baturyn from Kyiv, as well as imported German majolica tableware of the 17th and 18th centuries. Using computer techniques, S. Dmytriienko and I have reconstructed five ornamented belts of wealthy hetman officers.
One stove tile bears the incised Cyrillic inscription “Pets” (Пец). This could be the name of the person who commissioned the work or some mark of the ceramist who executed it. In any case, this is evidence of that craftsman’s literacy.
A number of arrowheads have been found in Mazepa’s court. Their presence indicates that the hetman troops, like the rest of the Ukrainian Cossacks, conservatively continued to practice archery until the 18th century, although firearms increasingly dominated their arsenal. Yu. Sytyi has suggested that hetman officers had to be proficient in all kinds of Cossack weaponry, including obsolete ones, and trained their soldiers in these military arts.
In 2013, among the debris of the service building, an elongated bronze plate with engraved linear and geometric ornaments was discovered. It can be identified as a section of the back end of a book casing. Written sources inform us that Mazepa’s palace in Baturyn included his library. This collection of publications and manuscripts was unrivalled in Ukraine at the time.
In the former Baturyn fortress, east of the cemetery of the ruined Holy Trinity Cathedral (1692), archaeologists have excavated the remnants of a spacious granary from the 17th – early 18th century. They unearthed 16 pits for storing grain, which were covered by a timber roof, as well as remnants of wooden building for the drying and processing of grain.
In 2003-04, near the Baturyn citadel, our expedition excavated the substructures of a similar complex containing 10 grain pits. It occupied over 100 square metres in area and in all likelihood belonged to the hetman. Tsarist troops sacked and burned these large grain magazines in 1708. Mazepa could have commissioned them when he secretly organized a military base in his capital for his rebellion and supplies of the allied Swedish army.
Archaeological research has shown that as a rule every burgher’s household in Baturyn had several pits for storing grain. According to Yu. Sytyi, the impressive number of granaries that have been uncovered indicates the significance of grain production to the economy of the hetman capital, as well as the prosperity of its population prior to the 1708 tragedy.
Close to the grain magazine excavated near the Trinity Cathedral’s site probably existed a contemporaneous dwelling of a well-to-do resident. There were found: fragments of stove tiles, ceramic and glass utensils, two ceramic chibouks of Cossack tobacco pipes, a carved bone mouthpiece made on a lathe, and fragments of iron craft tools from the 17th-18th century.
Two fragmentary terracotta stove tiles of the Mazepa period feature identical bas-reliefs of a horseman fashioned in a folk style. These tiles were made from a single chiseled wooden mould. On both fragments, only the lower half of a man dressed in a short jacket with a belt, close-fitting pants, and high boots has been preserved. Both of his legs lean against one side of a harnessed horse. Such a naïve manner of representing the pose of a rider was used in some 17th – century vernacular tiles. Comparable reliefs of mounted Cossacks, hunters, Western knights, or uhlans armed with spears are depicted on many 16th to 18th – century stove tiles found in Baturyn, Chernihiv, Subotiv, Kyiv, Cherkasy, Uman’, and other towns in central Ukraine. These motifs were derived from the image of the mounted knight with sabre on the state coat of arms of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, as well as that of St. George on a horse piercing a dragon with his lance. These images were often employed for heraldic emblems, flags, coins, book illustrations, and icons during the Cossack era, and they were replicated in a distinctive folk manner by Ukrainian artisans.
A typical ceramic toy with whistle in the shape of a stylized animal has also been found in Baturyn. It was decorated with brown and yellow ochre stripes. This example of vernacular art has numerous analogies among the ceramic glazed, painted, and terracotta zoomorphic figures of medieval and modern Ukraine. A deeply-rooted tradition of its production for the market lasted until the 20th century. Several similar 14th to 18th – century terracotta and stripe-painted toys or whistles in the form of stylized horses or other domestic animals and birds have been found in Kyiv.
While investigating the trench for a water pipe crossing the fortress’ territory, archaeologists discovered the remnants of 17 ordinary wooden dwellings and service structures from the 17th and early 18th centuries, all burned by the Russian invaders in 1708. In an empty grain pit, researchers found the skeleton of a teenager who lost his/her life during the massacre in Baturyn. Amidst the debris of a burnt dwelling (House #3) the leg bones of its slain inhabitant have been unearthed.
Archaeologists also found there the broken head of a terracotta female statuette, seemingly a doll. It may have been broken during the destruction of the house. I believe that a local artist fashioned this figurine in a naïve realistic manner under the influence of some Western Renaissance or baroque sculpture. This find represents a rare and valuable piece of ceramic three-dimensional anthropomorphic sculpture, specifically the art of vernacular toys of Ukraine at the turn of the 17th-18th centuries.
Clay female statuettes from the 14th to 18th centuries have been found in Kyiv, Vyshhorod, and Bila Tserkva in Ukraine, and in Belarus. Among the 20 fragments of Kyivan ceramic dolls of this time, series of the 17th-18th – century broken heads constitute the closest analogies to the Baturyn figurine. They have delicately modelled faces, and sometimes are painted in various colours. Researchers maintain that the realistic and humanistic Renaissance and baroque art of Italy, Germany, Poland, and Czechia influenced the sculptural techniques and artistic designs of these Kyivan dolls. Archaeological finds of this kind testify to the vibrant cultural ties between early modern Ukraine and these countries.
In 2006-09, our expedition excavated about 300 graves of the 17th and 18th centuries in the cemetery of the Trinity Cathedral. Yu. Sytyi discovered several victims of the 1708 carnage within the fourth level of graves there. Last year, archaeologists exhumed eight 17th-18th – century graves at this cemetery. The remains of a man with a pierced skull (Grave #4) can be associated with other casualties of the Muscovite onslaught.
The 2013 excavations in Baturyn have yielded important data regarding the adornment of Mazepa’s main residence and the little-known ceramic folk sculpture in the hetman capital. New archaeological evidence of its sheer destruction has come to light. My video interview for Ukrainian media about the findings of last year’s excavations in Baturyn is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odhNdkIb2wY&feature=c4-overview&list=UU_5I-7Yh_EmnU1rrRtkWO8w.
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For fourteen years, the excavations in Baturyn and the publication of its materials have been sponsored by the Kowalsky Program for the Study of Eastern Ukraine at CIUS, the Shevchenko Scientific Society of America, the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto, and the Ucrainica Research Institute in Toronto. The Chernihiv Oblast State Administration contributed a subsidy for our excavations.
The most generous benefactors of the Baturyn archaeological project are the late poetess Volodymyra Wasylyszyn (1926-2011) and her husband, artist Roman Wasylyszyn of Philadelphia. In 2013-14, the research of the hetman capital was supported with donations from the National Executive of the League of Ukrainian Canadians (Orest Steciw, president), the National Executive of the League of Ukrainian Women in Canada (Adriana Bujniak-Willson, president), the Toronto Branch of the League of Ukrainian Women in Canada (Halyna Vynnyk, president), the Kniahynia Olha Branch of the Ukrainian Women’s Association of Canada (Vera Melnyk, president), the Buduchnist Credit Union Foundation (Halyna Vynnyk, executive director, and Chrystyna Bidiak, personnel manager), the Prometheus Foundation (Maria Szkambara, president), the Olzhych Foundation in Canada (Maria Pidkowych, president), the Ukrainian Credit Union (Taras Pidzamecky, CEO), the Golden Lion Restaurant (Anna Kisil, owner), and St. Barbara’s Pharmacy Ltd. (Omelan and Zenia Chabursky, owners) in Toronto, as well as the Ukrainian Studies Fund at Harvard University (Dr. Roman Procyk, director), and the Ukrainian Historical and Educational Center of New Jersey at the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA (Natalia Honcharenko, director).
Despite the tense situation in Ukraine, during August of this year, archaeologists and students of history from Chernihiv and Hlukhiv universities as well as the Kyiv Mohyla Academy National University successfully continued with systematic excavations in Baturyn. Their results will be analysed and disseminated in publications and lectures in 2015. Our Canada-Ukraine archaeological expedition is preparing to resume the field research of Mazepa’s capital next summer. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian government, burdened with heavy military expenditures, is unable to fund our scholarly project. At the same time, the price of food, gasoline, and transportation in Ukraine has increased considerably.
The continued support of archaeological research in Baturyn and the publication of its findings by Ukrainian organizations, foundations, companies, and private benefactors in Canada and the United States will be vital in 2014-15. Canadian citizens are kindly invited to send their cheques with donations to: Mr. Orest Steciw, President, Ucrainica Research Institute, 9 Plastics Ave., Toronto, ON, Canada M8Z 4B6. Please make your cheques payable to: Ucrainica Research Institute (Memo: Baturyn Project).
American residents are advised to send their donations to: Prof. Martin Dimnik, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 59 Queen’s Park Cr. E., Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 2C4. Please make your cheques payable to: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (Memo: Baturyn Project). These institutes will send tax receipts to all donors in Canada and the USA. Those who assist this undertaking will be gratefully acknowledged in related publications and public lectures.
For additional information or questions about the Baturyn project, readers may contact the author of this article, Dr. Volodymyr Mezentsev (telephone: 416-766-1408; e-mail: v.mezentsev@ utoronto.ca). The researchers of Mazepa’s capital kindly thank the Ukrainian communities in North America for their much needed and greatly appreciated support of this archaeological undertaking during the crises in Ukraine.
