AND THROUGH THE AGES FLOWS THE OREL
Like a clear tear flows the River Orel across the Dnipro steppes. The water of the Orel, the primordial code of our people’s existence, reflects the transparent Ukrainian soul in the vault of the heavens. The Orel banks, blessed by the Divine light, are endemic to the wings of the Ukrainian soul. The water and the steppe touched one another and set millions of cosmic orchestras playing, and an instant became an eternity. The microns and atoms of the drops recorded in magical signs the knowledge, experience, and mindset of warriors, tillers, fishermen and hunters who were born, lived, and vanished into eternity.
“OH, RIVER OREL, WHENCE IS THY WATER FLOWING?”
The Orel empties into the Dnipro halfway between the Vorskla and the Samara. The river source is near the village Yefremivka, Kharkiv oblast, and the mouth (since 1967) on the outskirts of Dnipropetrovsk. The Orel is 384 kilometers long, with a basin area of 10,820 sq. km. The residents of Kharkiv, Poltava, and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts rightly consider it a river of their own because the river bed follows the administrative border between these oblasts on the Dnipro’s right bank and that of Dnipropetrovsk on the left one for as long as 141 km.
The Orel is fed by 28 tributaries over ten kilometers long. Just listen to the poetry of their names: Chaplynka, Zhuravka, Zaplavka, Buzivka, Orchyk, Berestova... Now about the name Orel itself. A legend has it that there once lived a Serpent and a Cossack next to each other. Failing to fairly divide the land, they fought. The Cossack won and, harnessing the Serpent to a plow, made him furrow a boundary down which the Orel eventually flowed. Some interpreters seek analogy with the Turkish word yerel which means “here and there” and characterizes the meandering course of the river. The Ipatiev Chronicle identifies “Ugra and Samara” as the geographic place of a victory Prince Mstyslav defeated the Polovetsians in 1152. The same source cites “a place called Yerel or Uhol, as it is known in Rus’.” From the sixteenth century onwards, the river was marked on old maps as Uhol, Ariel, and Arel.
A GREEN BRANCH ON A BIG TREE
The wide pit of the Orel valley was formed in the period when glaciers melted due to the powerful flow of water. The Dnipro glaciation left behind Kalytva Hill, a remarkable monument and a landscape beauty on the outskirts of the village Tsarychanka. It is here that the glacier’s tongue stopped, scraping together and piling up, as if it were a gigantic bulldozer, the strata and alluvia. Even today you can find the telling signs of glaciation, such as moraine boulders and Paleolithic aleurite plates, in the ravines and cliffs that crisscross Kalytva’s face. In the twentieth century, two manmade factors made a fundamental impact on the Orel’s hydrological pattern. When the Dniprodzerzhynsk Hydroelectric Plant was being built, the river’s natural mouth was moved downstream 49 km away from the village Shulhivka. The cut- off stretch of the old riverbed became itself a reverse-current river. In 1970-1981, the Dnipro- Donbas canal, built along the Orel’s left bank, crossed the riverbed 22 times, which greatly changed the basin area, redistributed the surface runoff, and provoked in some places the upsurge of surface and underground waters and a partial sinking of populated areas.
The river flowing far away from industrial centers, its valley has preserved, to a high degree, its natural features. Against the backdrop of major environmental changes in the Dnipro steppes (where natural ecosystems account for a only few percent of the territory), the river’s valley is a true oasis, a margin of life, a green branch on a big tree. Local residents even claim the Orel is Europe’s most unpolluted water artery. Unfortunately, reality contradicts this myth.
MEMORY OF THE CENTURIES
In all times, the Orel played a notable role in the history of southern Ukraine, serving as a boundary between the Steppe nomads and the Forest-Steppe settled tribes. At the turn of the twentieth Dmytro Yavornytsky began excavations in the Orel valley. But archeologists did their most fruitful work in the Orel basin in 1970-1975. What made them hurry was the construction of a canal, fraught with the destruction of most mounds. The excavations, led by Kyiv-based archeologist D. Y. Tieliehin, resulted in a whole kaleidoscope of finds, such as Neolithic and Mesolithic stopping off points, Neolithic, Bronze Age, Scythian, Sarmatian, and early Slavic settlements and burial grounds, including even those of Kyivan Rus’. More often than not, what was found in the same place featured ceramics and instruments of labor dating to different epochs, irrefutable evidence of the once teeming life in the densely-populated Orel valley.
As often happens, the most outstanding archeological discovery was made accidentally in 1973 by Kernosivka village schoolchildren on the place of a plowed over mound. The anthropomorphic stone statue they found, dating to the third millennium BC, is known in scholarly parlance as the Kernosivka Idol. Archeologist Larysa Churylova, quoting the Rigveda, the holy book of the ancient Aryans, interprets the statue as an image of the supreme Aryan god Indra, the demiurge, guardian of earthly well-being, and the patron of warriors and shepherds. This is a world memorial comparable to such famed antiquities as the Egyptian sphinxes or the stone giants on Easter Island.
After the devastating Tatar- Mongol invasion, the territories called the Wild Field began to be populated by Cossacks. It is under the aegis of the latter, to be more exact, on the basis of Cossack winter residences, that Ukrainian settlements began to be built on the banks of the Dnipro and its tributaries. Beautiful steppes, centuries old groves, valleys, lagoons, and lakes attracted the Cossacks. The names of today’s villages by the Oral — Lychkove, Kotovka, Kozyryshchyna, Kovpakovka, Hupalovka, etc. — derive from those of the first settlers. There were two administrative territorial units, the Orel and Protovivka palanky — of the Zaporozhzhian Sich in the Orel valley in late eighteenth century. They were set up by the kosh (Cossack council — Ed.) to prevent the free northern frontier from being captured by imperial Russia.
Under a Tsarist government order, over 400 kilometers of Ukrainian fortifications were built along the Orel’s steep right bank in 1731-1742. Its two solid ramparts ran from the Dnipro to Siversky Donets. Up to 30,000 peasants and Cossacks worked to build it. The line was sided by 18 fortresses and 140 redoubts. The fortifications’ defensive capacities were complemented by such natural factors as steep hills, swamps, and wooded wetlands. The construction of this line was the greatest manmade environmental disturbance in the area from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. As time passed, the woods neutralized the line. Only at short intervals has it been preserved in the shape of eroded embankments.
Churches, chapels, and monasteries have in all times been ample proof of the Ukrainian people’s talent and high culture. Situated on the Orel’s left, Tatar, bank, in by the town of Nekhvoroshcha, was the Nekhvoroshcha Assumption Monastery, a Zaporozhzhian Sich religious center, built in 1714. The monastery owned a mill, the woods, fishing lakes, and the villages of Hupalovka and Chernetchyna. The monastery walls hid a cathedral, a refectory church, the monks’ cells, and the household structures. Parishioners and monks consisted of Zaporozhzhian Cossacks. The destruction of the Sich also signaled the decline of the monastery: it was closed in 1786, the cathedral was transferred to Chernetchyna, and, years later, the small chapel that installed in its place and other monastery-related buildings also vanished. Early nineteenth century statistical sources claim there were as many as 28 churches, mostly wooden, in villages along the Orel in a short stretch from Perereshchepyne to Shulhivka (the Orel mouth). What has remained of them are only foundations: by tearing down temples, the Soviet ideological machine fought for human souls.
(To be concluded in the next issue)
