EXCAVATING THE HETMAN CAPITAL BATURYN IN 2014-2015
Volodymyr Mezentsev, Ph. D.
CIUS, Toronto
The Canada-Ukraine archaeological expedition has conducted annual field research in the town of Baturyn, Chernihiv Oblast, irrespective of the military actions in eastern Ukraine. In 2014, some 50 students and scholars from the universities of Chernihiv, Kyiv, and Hlukhiv took part in the excavations there. Last summer, the expedition involved 45 members from these institutions.
The expedition was headed by archaeologists Yurii Sytyi and Dr. Viacheslav Skorokhod of Chernihiv National University. Dr. Volodymyr Mezentsev of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) at the University of Alberta is the executive director of the Baturyn archaeological project from the Canadian side. Prof. Zenon Kohut, distinguished historian of the Hetmanate and previous director of CIUS, is the academic adviser. Leading historian on Chernihiv Principality, Prof. Martin Dimnik of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (PIMS) at the University of Toronto, also participates in the research of Baturyn and the publication of its findings.
In 1669, this town became the capital of the Cossack state. The glorious reign of Hetman Ivan Mazepa (1687-1709) was a golden age for Baturyn, when it competed with Kyiv and Chernihiv for supremacy and became known in the West. During Mazepa’s insurrection for the freedom of Cossack Ukraine from Moscow’s growing domination, Baturyn residents were the first to offer armed resistance to the Russian troops. They brutally suppressed this upraising. In 1708, the tsar’s army, aided by the traitor, occupied, plundered, and burned down the hetman capital, killing 5,000 to 6,500 garrison fighters and 6,000-7,500 civilian inhabitants, regardless of gender or age.
The enlightened Hetman Kyrylo Rozumovsky (1750-64) rebuilt Baturyn from the ruins, restored its status as the capital of the Cossack realm, and developed it into a major manufacturing centre in the Chernihiv land. After his death in 1803, the town gradually declined throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and revived in independent Ukraine. Following the reconstruction of the impressive fortress citadel, the hetman’s palaces, the state treasury house, the court hall, and churches, as well as the establishment of several modern museums of antiquities, since 2009, Baturyn has become one of the most popular tourist attractions in Ukraine. Despite the tense situation in the country, about 143,000 tourists visited its museums and historical sites last year, an increase of 13,000 from 2014.
In 1751-53, Rozumovsky commissioned his first palace in Baturyn, which was demolished in 1821. It was probably designed by the renowned Italian architect Antonio Rinaldi, whom the hetman invited to Ukraine in 1751. Descriptions from the 18th and 19th centuries tell us that this palace was a spacious one-story late baroque wooden building with private living quarters, two side wings for guests, an inside chapel, and a rich library.
In 2014, Yu. Sytyi discovered the trenches from the dismantled brick foundations of this palace near the town’s secondary school. On the basis of architectural drawings of analogous timber palaces in the Chernihiv and Sumy regions of the 1740s as well as descriptions of the first Rozumovsky residence in Baturyn, this writer and computer artist Serhii Dmytriienko (Chernihiv) have completed a hypothetical graphic reconstruction of its front elevation.
The expedition has continued excavating the remnants of Mazepa’s manor in Honcharivka, a suburb of Baturyn. In the late 1690s, he constructed there a masonry palace (20 by 14.5 m) with three stories, a basement, and a mansard primarily in a Western baroque style. This main residence of the hetman was pillaged and burned by Muscovite troops during the town’s ravaging in 1708.
Archaeological and architectural research of the palace debris, along with analysis of a 1744 drawing of its ruins preserved at the National Museum in Stockholm, have allowed investigators to determine the ground plan, size, design, and decoration of the edifice. The author and S. Dmytriienko have prepared hypothetical graphic reconstructions of the exterior of Mazepa’s palace. I posit that it had no counterparts among contemporaneous secular buildings of central Ukraine but was similar to the tower-like royal and aristocratic palatial halls of early modern Poland. Some analogous examples of the latter include the three-story masonry residential tower of King Sigismund I the Old in the town of Piotrkόw, Łódź Voivodeship (1519, 20 by 18 m), the lost mansions of magnates Kazanowski (late 16th century) and Kotowski, as well as the restored castle of princes Ostrozky (Ostrogski) from the 1680s in Warsaw.
As a youth, Mazepa served at the court of King John II Casimir Vasa in Warsaw, and he could well have modelled his Baturyn residence on palaces in the neighbouring Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. At the same time, it is possible that the hetman borrowed the pattern from some fashionable baroque structure in Western Europe. It was from there that the type of tower halls of the 14th-16th centuries as well as Renaissance and baroque architecture and ornamentation spread to Poland. In 1656-59, Mazepa travelled and studied at universities in Germany, France, Holland, and Italy and had the opportunity to familiarise himself with true masterpieces of baroque architecture there.
Archaeologists have unearthed hundreds of fragments of fine ceramic glazed multicoloured and terracotta floor and stove tiles, or kakhli, as well as plate-like rosettes and plaques bearing Mazepa’s coat of arms that revetted the faҫades of his villa in Honcharivka. These details are recognized as valuable examples of Ukrainian baroque decorative and heraldic arts. Yu. Sytyi has established that they were fashioned by accomplished Kyivan craftsmen whom the hetman brought to Baturyn. Thus, the imposing adornment of his principal residence represented a blending of Western and Ukrainian baroque styles.
Research on the Honcharivka palace’s floor pavements has shown that there were at least nine rooms, halls, vestibules, corridors, storage areas, and the like on the ground and upper levels, as well as five vaulted chambers, a corridor, and a staircase in the basement. I surmise that the basement had a brick floor and that it stored the state/military and hetman’s private treasuries. The ground floor was paved by elongated six-angled ceramic tiles combined with square tiles all covered by green enamel. A gala hall for official receptions, council meetings, and banquets could have been situated on this ground level.
On the second and third stories and mansard, were likely located the bedchambers and living quarters of Mazepa and his wife (hetmanova) Hanna, the hetman’s office, his private and general military chancelleries, a library, and the state archives. Presumably the floors there were made of ornate ceramic square and octagonal tiles faced with common flask-green and rare blue enamel as well as unusual bicolour half terracotta-half glazed apple-green tiles. Mazepa and his wife may have personally selected the shapes and colours of these tiles and inlays for the floors. Cheaper ceramic floor tiles without glazing were apparently used in the less important and more modestly furnished service premises and rooms for servants or guests.
Examples of early modern floor designs and inlays comparable to those discovered at the Honcharivka palace have been found in St. Sophia Cathedral (the 17th-century floor in its altar apse) in Kyiv; the Holy Trinity Cathedral (1675) at the Hustyn Monastery in Chernihiv Oblast; the 16th-18th-century castle of the Ostrozky princes in the town of Ostroh, Rivne Oblast, Ukraine; as well as the residences of Polish kings on Wawel Hill in Cracow and the Wilanόw district of Warsaw (1696). In my conclusion, the principal residence of Mazepa in Baturyn was his largest and most lavishly embellished secular building as well as an outstanding piece of both the palatial architecture and the ceramic decorative art of the Cossack state.
In 2014, our expedition finished excavating the remnants of a sizeable elongated timber structure (19 by 5 m) which stood at Mazepa’s estate in Honcharivka. Perhaps this was the military barracks, or kurin, that housed either members of the hetman’s bodyguard (serdiuky) or Cossack officers (starshyna) from his retinue. At this building were found: silver and copper Polish and Russian coins, bronze buttons, a clasp and four figured belt appliqués with relief floral patterns and engravings, lead musket and pistol bullets, iron heel plates for boots, ceramic tobacco pipes of local manufacture, fragments of German glazed tableware and Dutch porcelain chibouks and mouthpieces from the 17th-18th centuries.
On the base of 16 bronze clasps and appliqués unearthed at this site in 2011-14, the author and S. Dmytriienko have prepared hypothetical computer reconstructions of five ornamented leather belts of wealthy Cossack officers. These could have been the work of artisans from Baturyn or some other centres of crafts in the Hetmanate.
The Cossack elite was the main consumer of expensive local white-clay tobacco pipes and those of Dutch porcelain. The great quantity of such pipes found in the barracks provides additional argument that its residents belonged to the officer class. Thus, the excavations of this edifice have enriched our knowledge about the armament, accoutrement, consumption of domestic and imported goods, the prosperity, culture, lifestyle and customs of Cossack officers at Mazepa’s court.
Yu. Sytyi’s archaeological explorations in 2014-15 revealed the site of the Church of the Presentation of the Mother of God near the extant masonry residence of Judge General Vasyl Kochubei at Baturyn’s western edge. He constructed this church with squared oak logs in the late 17th century. It survived the Muscovite onslaught on the hetman capital. In 1778, Rozumovsky ordered to dismantle the Presentation Church and reassemble it in the neighbouring village of Matiivka. Soviet authorities demolished this monument of wooden Ukrainian folk architecture in 1933.
Last summer, at Kochubei’s court were also found: five 17th-18th-century Polish and Russian silver and copper coins, two lead musket bullets, two copper buttons, a costly bronze wedding ring with a gem, two iron belt clasps, a bronze oval plain clasp, and three bronze figured belt appliqués. One of the latter was gilded and broken. These bronze and gilt ornaments were probably manufactured locally for the consumption of the Cossack elite at the hetman capital.
Two intact belt appliqués were shaped and engraved in the form of a stylized three-petal flower, or lily. They resemble three bronze figured belt appliqués uncovered among the remnants of the military barracks at Mazepa’s manor in 2012-13. Consequently, all these analogous artifacts can be dated to a time preceding the 1708 destruction of Baturyn. Leather belts with such characteristic bronze decorations were apparently produced for the local market and commonplace among Cossack officers and state officials in Baturyn during the Mazepa era.
Last year, north of the former Baturyn fortress, in the market square, Yu. Sytyi’s excavations unearthed the foundations of an unidentified 18th-century structure. Its foundation trenches were filled with broken 17th-century bricks, many of which exhibit fire damage. This researcher suggests that these burnt bricks came from the masonry of St. Nicholas Church. Mazepa donated 4,000 gold coins (zoloti) for its construction. This church stood somewhere within the present-day market square and probably suffered from the conflagration of the town in 1708. Rozumovsky dismantled its ruins and reused the bricks for his buildings.
In 2014, in the fortress, east of the site of the Holy Trinity Cathedral (1692), which was endowed by Mazepa and burned by the tsarist forces, remnants of the 17th-18th-century storage structures of well-to-do burghers were excavated. Archaeologists found there: low-denomination Polish silver coins, fragments of refined plates made from milk-glass and painted with polychrome plant motifs (likely a Turkish imitation of expensive chinaware), iron and bone buttons, two ceramic gaming chips, and shards of terracotta stove tiles of local production of this time. Archaeological finds of imported goods testify to the broad commercial and cultural contacts of Baturyn with Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe, as well as the Islamic East, prior to 1708.
In the fortress, three tiny terracotta human figures have been unearthed. The lower parts, arms, and the head of one of them are broken off. Their body shapes, facial features, and head dress were coarsely and naïvely executed. The modelling technique of these images shows no influences of realistic baroque or neoclassical sculpture.
Presumably these rare artifacts represent distinctive vernacular toys created by a local Baturyn potter during the Rozumovsky era. Clay female statuettes from the 14th to 18th centuries have been found in Kyiv, Vyshhorod, Bila Tserkva, and Baturyn. An early modern terracotta anthropomorphic figurine comparable to those described above was discovered in the village of Ulanovo, Hlukhiv region, Sumy Oblast, in 2009. In my preliminary analysis, toys of this design and technique were manufactured in Baturyn, Hlukhiv, and possibly other centres of pottery making in the Chernihiv and Sumy lands in the 18th-19th centuries. These pieces may indicate a revival of ceramic folk art in Baturyn during its reconstruction by Rozumovsky in the second half of the 18th century.
In 2014, in the town’s northern outskirts, a fragment of a burnt glazed heraldic stove tile was found. It features the relief coat of arms of the famous Pylyp Orlyk, Secretary General of Mazepa’s administration, a future émigré hetman (1710-42), and the author of the first Ukrainian constitution (1710). Archaeologists hope to locate the remnants of Orlyk’s ruined residence at the site where this tile was found.
Exploratory excavations carried out by V. Skorokhod in the Baturyn district of Podil, on the flood-land of the Seim River, uncovered the remnants of wooden structures which were burned by the tsarist troops in 1708.
For many years, archaeologists have excavated the remains of hundreds of buried and unburied victims of the Russian assault in every part of the town and its environs. The leading researcher of the Baturyn necropolis, Yu. Sytyi, has revealed their graves in several 17th-18th-century cemeteries.
In 2014, our expedition excavated 10 graves of the townsfolk from this time at the burial ground of Trinity Cathedral in the fortress. Yu. Sytyi identified the skeletons of two adults and one child (Graves Nos. 1, 13, 14) as victims of this massacre. In particular, the infillings of their grave pits included charcoal particles from the 1708 conflagration. Last summer, archaeologists excavated 80 graves from the 17th-18th centuries at this cemetery. Some contained casualties of the 1708 Muscovite attack on Baturyn. The results of these field investigations and examination of exhumed bones by specialists in physical anthropology are now being analysed and the conclusions will be published in June.
The excavations in Baturyn in 2014-15 have obtained valuable information for locating the 1751 hetman residence and the Presentation and St. Nicholas churches, as well as for the research and reconstruction of the architectural design and embellishment of the Mazepa and Rozumovsky palaces and personal adornment of the Cossack elite at the hetman court. The latest historical and archaeological findings have also demonstrated the vibrancy of the ecclesiastical and palatial building, miller’s trade, crafts, applied arts, and international commerce of the town before 1708. Every year, our expedition provides new archaeological evidence of the total destruction of Mazepa’s capital.
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For 15 years, the Baturyn project has been sponsored by the Kowalsky Program for the Study of Eastern Ukraine at CIUS, PIMS, and the Ucrainica Research Institute in Toronto. In 2005-15, the Chernihiv Oblast State Administration contributed annual subsidies for the excavations at Baturyn.
The late poetess Volodymyra Wasylyszyn and her husband, artist Roman Wasylyszyn of Philadelphia, the late Dr. Maria Fischer-Slysh of Toronto, and Alexandra Zolobecky-Misiong of Livonia, Michigan, have been the most generous patrons of the study of Baturyn. In 2014-15, research on the hetman capital and the preparation of publications was supported with donations from the National Executive of the League of Ukrainian Canadians (Orest Steciw, president), the League of Ukrainian Canadians Toronto Branch (Borys Mykhaylets, president), the National Executive of the League of Ukrainian Women in Canada (Lesia Shymko, president), the League of Ukrainian Women in Canada Toronto Branch (Halyna Vynnyk, president), the Kniahynia Olha Branch of the Ukrainian Women’s Association of Canada (Vera Melnyk, president), the Buduchnist Credit Union Foundation (Bob Leshchyshen, president; Oksana Prociuk, CEO; and Chrystyna Bidiak, personnel manager), the Prometheus Foundation (Maria Szkambara, president), the Ukrainian Credit Union (Taras Pidzamecky, CEO), the Golden Lion Restaurant (Anna Kisil, owner), and the Healing Source Integrative Pharmacy (Omelan and Zenia Chabursky, owners) in Toronto, 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).
Next summer, our Canada-Ukraine archaeological expedition will renew the systematic excavations in Baturyn. However, because of the current situation in Ukraine and state budget cuts to academic and educational institutions there, it is unlikely that the Ukrainian government will fund our scholarly project this year.
The continued support of archaeological research in Baturyn and the publication of its findings in 2016 by Ukrainian organizations, foundations, companies, and private benefactors in Canada and the United States will be much needed and greatly appreciated. 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 attention of Mr. Stan Kamski, Treasurer, 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 official tax receipts to all Canadian and American donors, and they will be gratefully acknowledged in related publications and public lectures.
For additional information or questions about the Baturyn project, readers may contact this author (tel.: 416-766-1408; email: v.mezentsev@utoronto.ca). The researchers of Mazepa’s capital kindly thank the Ukrainian communities in North America for their generous support of this archaeological undertaking during the past 15 years. They believe that with your help it will overcome the challenges of these war years.
