Tovsta Mohyla site is grown over with weeds…

Dnipropetrovsk civic activists intend to demand that the authorities erect a monument to outstanding Ukrainian archeologist Borys Mozolevsky in the city. His expedition made a fantastic find when excavating Tovsta Mohyla mound four decades ago, this find being the Scythian gold pectoral which had brought great fame to Ukraine worldwide. “The Ukrainian scholar is commonly compared to British Egyptologist Howard Carter who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun. Two-thirds of the exhibits in the State Museum of Historical Treasures are Mozolevsky’s finds. We want to get the monument to him erected at some street in the center of Dnipropetrovsk. After all, this outstanding person made most of his finds in Dnipropetrovsk region,” head of the Orthodox Christian Brotherhood NGO Andrii Tuiakov said at the press conference. The activists are alarmed by the fact that the memorial sign at the site of Mozolevsky’s expedition base camp disappeared without warning at the end of 2011.

Director of Nikopol Local History Museum Oleksandr Kushniruk clarified the memorial sign issue in his commentaries for The Day. It turns out that the sign had to be removed due to the sad circumstances of our commercialized epoch. “We have moved the sign, a five-ton granite stele to Nikopol. The thing is, the tourist center that had served as Mozolevsky’s expedition base camp for years has been privatized, and they are reconstructing the site. Therefore, we decided to remove the memorial sign for the sake of preservation and re-install it outside our museum. It will stand there side-by-side with the stone figures that were collected by the archeologists,” the director explained. Director of Dnipropetrovsk Regional Center for Cultural Heritage Protection Lidia Holubchyk thinks that the situation with Mozolevsky’s memorial sign should not be overdramatized. “The sign did not have the status of historical monument. The law prescribes that such status may be assigned only to historical event sites and highly artistic works. The sign in question is just a granite slab with text on it that Mozolevsky’s admirers erected at the campsite of expeditions that belonged to the Institute of Archeology of Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic’s Academy of Sciences,” she said. According to Holubchyk, the trailer camp existed at the Ordzhonikidze ore mining and processing concern’s tourist center’s premises for many years. The archeologists lived there during Mozolevsky’s tenure as well as under Polin’s leadership later on. “However,” Holubchyk said, “we had come to the point when the need for land certificate arose, because the campsite had been allocated to the archeologists informally. Therefore, we had to address the issue of transferring the memorial sign and stone figures which the archeologists had kept in the camp since Mozolevsky’s time.” The exact destination of these relics was not immediately clear, as there were proposals to remove them to Yavornytsky Dnipropetrovsk National Historical Museum as well as to the Nikopol Local History Museum. The latter’s management offered to “re-home” the memorial sign and Scythian stone figures. “The granite block has been moved by crane and will be installed in Nikopol as soon as the weather warms up,” Holubchyk said. She added that the Nikopol museum staff members are very careful with monuments of national culture. For now, however, Tovsta Mohyla, the site of the golden pectoral find, is grown over with shrubs, trees, and weeds.