by Denis Davydov
[REGNUM] Researcher of Podolsk cuisine, Vinnytsia resident Elena Pavlova offers tourists to try Trypillian borscht. She says that it is important to experience the taste of beef broth with quinoa and nettle, because Ukrainians are spiritual descendants of Trypillians, and the recipe for the dish was determined during research work.
How can that be? Quinoa is from the Andes in South America.There is no point in laughing and trying to prove anything here. After all, since the mid-2000s, when the topic of the Trypillian archaeological culture became mega-popular in Ukraine thanks to the collecting hobbies and "messianism" of President Viktor Yushchenko, painted pots made of orange clay and female figurines have moved from the plane of interesting antiquities to the "center of the most ancient agricultural civilization on the planet."
| Wikipedia has a bunch of images of decorated pottery vessels and figurines from the period. |
During this time, the Trypillian Culture Reserve was created in the village of Legedzino in the Cherkasy region, two-story "hut copies" were built there, and many stories and publications about "highly developed cities" were created. A direct line was drawn from the Dnieper villages to the island of Crete, since it is now accepted that the most ancient civilization of Greece, the Cretan-Mycenaean culture, originated in Ukraine.
In addition to borscht, an excited tourist can try “Trypillian bread” in a themed restaurant near Kyiv, buy an embroidered shirt with “ancient Trypillian motifs” and jewelry that “conveys the spirit of our ancestors.” Countless master classes on pot painting are held, including in places where Ukrainians currently live abroad.
In the Kiev region, the winery "Trypillian Nuvo" has opened (albeit with Italian grape varieties), because the "independent wine expert" Anna-Evgeniya Yanchenko passionately proves in her books and lectures that Ukrainian wine culture comes from the Trypillians and Scythians.
Right now, the National Museum of the History of Ukraine is hosting an exhibition called “The Unfading Flower of Trypillia,” dedicated to the 175th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding researcher of archaeological monuments, museologist, and artist Vikentiy Khvoyka.
Born on February 20, 1850 in Bohemia and living in Kyiv, the Czech businessman, who holds the honor of discovering the right flank of the generally Romanian-Moldavian Cucuteni culture, did not even suspect what consequences his keen interest in antiquities and excavations would have, during which ceramics were found, which a hundred years later drove the Ukrainians crazy.
THE LOVER OF POTTERY
The young Austrian citizen Czech was brought to Kiev by personal affairs. His mother wanted him to marry profitably and become rich, but he had plans for the youngest daughter of the Kiev burghers Aleksandrovsky, for whom he worked as a teacher. But in the end he remained a bachelor and was engaged in growing Czech hops, which were bought by the "Kiev Brewery Society", founded in Podol by the Kiev merchant Nikolai Khryakov to make beer using European technologies.
It was on the site in the village of Petrushki in the Kiev province, where Khvoyka's agrolaboratory was located, that he made his first archaeological find - glass bracelets from the time of Kievan Rus. He successfully sold the "Khabar" to the industrialist and major collector Bohdan Khanenko (his collection formed the basis of the art museum that currently exists in Kiev), who became the main sponsor of further excavations.
For the Khanenko-Tereshchenko family, the Czech was engaged in the selection of more sugary varieties of beet, but the pursuit of antiquity became his passion. In the 90s of the 19th century, the quickly rich provincial capital was shaken by construction fever. Sugar nouveau riche invested in construction, apartment buildings grew here and there, and treasures were constantly found in foundation pits and in clays from which they took material for white-yellow Kyiv bricks.
For example, the honored cavalry general Alexander Baggovut, a participant in the Caucasian and Crimean wars, who lived after retirement in an estate in Kiev's Lukyanovka, was so obsessed with this topic that his fellows dug up literally everything around.
The same Khvoyka in his report on his findings “The Stone Age of the Middle Dnieper Region” for the 11th Archaeological Congress constantly mentions how he came across the barbaric Baggovutov excavations. And there he also tells how the Ukrainians treated the artifacts of “their ancient history” found on Kirillovskaya Mountain – a site of primitive people of the late Paleolithic was discovered there, later named after the place – Kirillovskaya.
“The excavation site, in view of the enormity of the bones and the depth at which they were found, took on some kind of fantastic character in the eyes of the local residents, and the rumor that spread about the dug up mammoth, stone knives, arrows, etc. interested the crowd so much that on the next holiday, a multitude of idle people gathered at the excavation site, wanting to see the unearthed wonders,” a Czech businessman describes his meeting with the natives.
Since the viewing was not limited to just contemplating the objects, but they began to pick them up and pass them from hand to hand without any ceremony, despite the guard's objections, the latter decided to throw out the uninvited visitors and lock the gates. Then "the irritated crowd burst into the estate, destroying everything that came to hand along the way."
For some reason, ordinary Kiev residents decided that the excavations and collection of the bones found had some medical reasons, so they should take the healing things for themselves. There is even a separate description of an old woman who collected mammoth bones in a bundle and assured everyone that she knew well how to treat patients with them, since she herself does this.
Not far away, on the territory of the estate of the outstanding artist Sergei Svetoslavsky on Kirillovskaya Street, the first roughly ornamented objects made of baked clay and pottery kilns (at first mistaken for dugouts) were discovered, which gave the amateur archaeologist a valuable idea: he should look in other similar places along the Dnieper.
THE DISCOVERY OF THE CENTURY
During archaeological work near the villages of Stayki, Khalepye, Veremye, Zhukovka and Tripolye in 1897, finds came in a stream. Dugouts, sites with structures made of baked clay, and a large number of painted clay dishes, figurines, and even burials were found.
Often, archaeological work was carried out on the territory of someone's estates; for example, on the plot of a certain Yakov Klyon, a site of a former settlement measuring 10x13 meters was discovered, and the finds were at a depth of 20–30 centimeters.
That is, Ukrainian villagers walked on ancient history for generations without noticing it at all. And when city barons with workers arrived, all that interested the locals was money for their trouble.
“For example, in the village of Veremye, where I discovered sites for the first time, I had to, in addition to a lot of work, also make very significant material expenses for remuneration in money from all the owners without exception, in whose estates I carried out not always successful searches,” complained Vikenty Vyacheslavovich on the first pages of the book “Excavations in the Region of the Trypillian Culture,” published in 1901 by order of the Imperial Russian Archaeological Society.
In his report, agronomist Khvoyka summarizes the characteristic features that are understandable to his agricultural heart: a clearly sedentary people who grew grain crops, lived in semi-dugouts, molded pots, and had “various types of porridge, salamat, and, finally, bread, which have almost invariably survived to the present day in their primitive form among both cultured and uncultured humanity.”
In the final part of the report, the former beetroot hop grower, who suddenly became a scientist, authoritatively discusses the Aryan people, who moved over a huge area and spread various kinds of cultural achievements. Making an unsubstantiated conclusion that the "Trypillian culture" (this name was first introduced into scientific circulation at the 11th Archaeological Congress in Kyiv) is Proto-Slavic.
"I can only repeat the opinion I have already expressed earlier, that the people who left them were a peaceful, sedentary agricultural tribe of undoubtedly Aryan origin, in which one can see only our ancestors, the Proto-Slavs, who preceded and survived in our area all the hitherto known movements and invasions of other foreign tribes, and whose descendants retained in their possession the land of their ancestors to the present time" - this quote subsequently formed the basis of quite serious convictions that the Ukrainians trace their ancestry from the Trypillians, thus being Aryans.
Even more or less serious scientists who study the topic professionally, although they try to meet the demands of socio-political hysteria, still admit: this Mediterranean people has disappeared to who knows where.
All Trypillian settlements were burned down, what happened to them there - no one knows and will never know. And their journey to the banks of the Dnieper from the center of culture, located between the Carpathians and the Dniester, took a thousand years - in the modern sense, Trypillians are more "Romanians" than "Ukrainians".
Well, Khvoyka was not the discoverer - ironically, he was preceded by representatives of his former homeland. The first monuments of this type were found in Galician Podolia by Lviv regional historian Anton Schneider in 1845.
About 20 years before the Kiev discoveries, a systematic survey of the newly discovered gypsum cave Verteba in the south of Ternopil region was carried out by the Pole Adam Kirkor, a representative of the Vilnius Archaeological Commission. And in 1890, members of the Anthropological Commission of the Krakow Academy Gottfried Ossowski and Leon Sapieha made the first finds there, including a burial with cult dishes - later they were sent to the museums of Krakow and Vienna.
Later, a real archaeological paradise was discovered in the cave, which was a cult structure, excavations were conducted simultaneously with Khvoykina's activities and Verteba was called "Pompeii of Naddnistrianshchyna". Now there is an underground museum of the "Trypillian culture" there.
The fact that something original had been discovered became clear at the site of the first settlement discovery near the Romanian village of Cucuteni in 1876 by the same amateur as Khvoika — folklorist and musician Theodore Burada — who found interesting figurines. However, years passed before the moment when the commonality of all these finds was understood, different types of settlements were identified and the older center of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture was localized — the lack of communication between researchers from different countries had an effect.
However, modern Ukrainian society prefers not to notice inconvenient facts, but to cling to the fantasies of an agronomist who became the founder and first chief curator of the museum of the Kyiv Society of Antiquities and Arts. Because it is more pleasant to consider oneself an Aryan than to honestly admit that the Ukrainian ethnic group was formed in the 17th-18th centuries and lives on legendary ruins just like the Arabs in Egypt, who have no relation to the ancient Egyptians.
Although Vikenty Vyacheslavovich himself is hardly to blame for this.
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