Edward Pfalz Pfein is sure that Askaniya Nova is in good hands
Every time the riverboat Maksym Rylsky casts anchor at the port of Kakhovka she lets out a long hoot. The captain does it in compliance with the request of one of the most prestigious passengers, Baron Edward Pfalz Pfein of the aristocratic family setting up the Askaniya Nova nature preserve in the Tauric steppe, who wants thus to greet his native land.
The baron is ninety years old and he is fond of poking fun at his age: “I will be 100 soon. I am your living legend, but I feel as though I were thirty.” The venerable blue blood takes a keen interest in life. He helps St. Petersburg museums locate works of art and replenish their stock, helps Yulian Semenov’s comrades selflessly searching for the Amber Room, supervises experts tracing his family history. He takes part in the Tauric Games Festival (another round to start a month from now), because it takes place in his native Kakhovka. To all those asking about the secret of his eternal youth, the baron replies, “Eat less, go in for sports (he still cycles), and quit all bad habits.” Once his mother said that Edward should never consume alcohol. He was an obedient son and has not touched the bottle or lit a cigarette to this day. Now love for women is by no means a bad habit, not in the baron’s eyes. On the contrary, Herr Edward Pfalz Pfein considers that healthy sex is what keeps a man alive.
The baron is a romantic. He cherishes the memory of his first love, a German blonde, which happened more than sixty years ago. At one time he was determined to find her, but knew better at the last moment, scared by the prospect of facing not a damsel but an old woman, thus ruining the first and lasting love idyll. His two marriages proved unhappy. After his second wife, a photo model thirty years his junior, died of an overdose, Edward Pfalz Pfein became convinced that marriage was not for him. Formally a bachelor, he cannot spend a day without a representative of the fairer sex. The baron has headed the Queen of Ukraine jury as part of the Tauric Games. In fact, he promises the organizing committee to be in Kakhovka again this July, unless he takes ill.
Liking the ladies is a family trait of the stronger half of the Pfalz Pfeins. There is still a white marble statue by the entrance to the Askaniya Nova Park, portraying a beautiful woman, like an ancient goddess. It is said to have been commission by Friedrich Pfalz Pfein, Edward’s grandfather, commemorating his unfortunate love of an ordinary peasant girl from Poltava guberniya. He met her at the Kakhovka labor exchange when hiring earthwork manpower. Captivated by her beauty, he wanted to marry her, but the family was adamantly opposed, the girl was sent out of the estate and a grief- stricken Friedrich found consolation in tireless work to set up the nature preserve.
Then his son Alexander took over, marrying General Yepanchin’s daughter (he served as the model for Dostoyevsky’s Idiot). It was with her and their son Edward that Alexander Pfalz Pfein immigrated in 1917, abandoning not only his family estate but a lifelong cause, the Askaniya Nova Preserve. The loss was too heavy and the baron’s heart gave way. He died on the way to a new home in a country faraway from Ukraine. His son could return only six decades later.
It happened during the 1980 Olympics. Edward Pfalz Pfein, a devout athlete, was at the head of the Liechtenstein national team. Even though the Soviet authorities assured one and all that there would be no restraints on the Olympic contestants’ movement, the baron was clever, stating the purpose of his trip to Kakhovka was to familiarize himself with the local soccer team.
Askaniya Nova has been his first and only true obsession and his lasting pain. Already in 1856, a landlord named Pfalz Pfein purchased the estate of the German Prince of Anhalt-KЪthen (almost 50,000 hectares). Several decades later it would be included in biology textbooks around the world, for the site, originally a model sheep- breeding farm, was now an oasis of nature protected from human encroachment. The first open-air cages for birds and local mammals were built in 1874, eventually transforming into a unique acclimatization zoo. Askaniya Nova’s current pride is the Arboretum, also sired and cultivated by the Pfalz Pfeins. In fact, water for the trees and irrigation was delivered by horse-drawn carts laden with barrels, all the way from Kherson. Tsar Nicholas II conferred the Pfalz Pfeins with a coat of arms portraying Przevalsky’s horse.
“I have a photo in the family archives, showing me in the Russian tsar’s lap, it was taken in 1914 when the family estate was honored by a royal visit,” says the baron proudly.
It is also true that a jubilee coin was minted in Ukraine several decades later, with the national emblem on the one side and Pfalz Pfein coat of arms on the other. After the Russian revolution, the preserve was nationalized, along with other noble property. Sofia Bohdan Pfalz Pfein, Baron Edward’s grandmother refused to immigrate and was killed by the Bolsheviks on her family estate. The Reds could not forgive her business talent; she was a woman of strong will and set up a port at Khorol, not far from Kakhovka, sending regular weekly shipments of grain and wool to London. The port was not ice-bound in winter and her business thrived.
Few other aristocratic families leaving Ukraine after the revolution, losing practically everything, have been magnanimous enough to ascribe their perils to historical cataclysms. Thus, the Trubetskoi princely family, currently in Paris, adamantly refuse to start a joint venture with Ukrainian winemakers. “They murdered our near and dear, took everything away from us, yet they want to have our names on bottle labels,” was what Baron Edward Pfalz Pfein heard when trying to act as an envoy of the Ukrainian side. Personally, he believes that contemporary Ukraine should not be held responsible for what happened then. Thus he visits Kherson oblast not to claim property appropriated by the revolutionary proletariat, but to make sure that Askaniya Nova is in good hands.
Baron Edward Pfalz Pfein paid for the construction of a church at Havrylivka, the village by the ruins of the family estate, the mansion once towering over the Dnipro. The house once inhabited by his grandfather Alexander Pfalz Pfein, founder of Askaniya Nova, is being restored in Chaplynka at his cost. Baron Edward Pfalz Pfein, watching the nature preserve effectively managed and developed, he says, “I’m glad that Askaniya Nova has a good proprietor,” and he really means it.
