Trakhtemyriv Scythian

Some may call this man a recluse, some may choose to use the buzz word “downshifter,” but people in the surrounding villages call him Skif (Scythian). I am talking about Oleh Petryk, who has been living for over 20 years in Trakhtemyriv, Kaniv district, a former Cossack capital. Once a Kyiv actor, Petryk came to Trakhtemyriv to make a film on the flooding of villages and stayed behind for good. He bought a house from an old man, Prokip. Incidentally, this house was built in 1996 and has considerably collapsed into the ground, so he had to dig it up.

Petryk has three dogs now: two greyhounds, Lad and Skif, and a boxer bitch Dynaria, who must be always taken care of. He has to walk the greyhounds every day and cover the distance of at least 18 kilometers, while Dynaria guards the home. Last year the master took her to Kyiv for surgery: the vets excised a cancerous tumor and said the dog had no more than three months to live. But Dynaria is still up and running around the courtyard.

“It is Trakhtemyriv: nothing bad can happen here to man or animal,” Petryk assures me. He says he really feels a happy man here. All he misses is the movies: what we have now is the film industry, not real films. He occasionally goes to a nearby village to watch a movie, for there is no electricity in his house. He scathingly criticizes most of the films he sees: earlier, the idea was to stress what and through what, rather than how, I want to say, but now the “how factor” comes first. And, what is more, people cannot watch old movies because their tired brains are now completely atrophied by computers. “Look: I’ve stopped turning an iron bar and I am feeling weaker. But it is the brain — you must always keep it busy and develop it. And now? You just type a combination on the keyboard, get an answer, and forget it right away. No analyses, no conclusions…” He admits there is the script of a fantasy film about three (black, white, and red) knights in his drawer. Andrei Tarkovsky wanted to film this script, but he died, and now there is nobody now to do it. Petryk points to the dogs that are prancing in the courtyard. We laugh because the three dogs are of the same colors as those of the knights in their master’s screenplay.

Petryk does not long for the be-nefits of civilization. There is no power supply in his house, but he has a cell phone: he never calls anybody, and those who want to fix an appointment (a lot of people come to see Petryk) call him by themselves. He switches on the phone for an hour in the evening. He makes an appointment and receives all those who have come for the first time, then — depending on how one has presented themselves. Sometimes you can see 10-12 cars parked by his house on a weekend. People come from all places. For our hero’s house resembles a genuine museum. There are lots of weapons here, a fragment of an ancient church’s resonator, a glued-over Trypillia pitcher, a Cherniakhivsk-culture chimerical lamp, an Ancient Rus’ warrior’s knife, a Yaroslav the Wise-era spade… The host found many of these objects in Trakhtemyriv, others were made by the well-known Kyiv master Yulian Tykhonov.

“Yulian saved this one, when the Dovzhenko Film Studios was burning the props as garbage,” he points at a wooden statue from a Polish cathedral (Ukrainian baroque, late 17th century). “And this is a 3,000-year-old head of Minerva. It was found lying on the lawn of Kyiv’s Volodymyrska Street,” Petryk says laughing. He is one of those people who appreciate things and believe that if an object has been stored for a long time, it carries the energy of bygone times and helps restore communication with those who have lived before. It is perhaps for this reason that the host sleeps on… an Ancient Rus’ medicine man’s stove. He found it in a locality called Monastyriok. The stove is of an unusual shape: the stones are laid in a circle and there is a hole inside. It somewhat resembles a sacrificial altar. Petryk puts some wooden planking above and sleeps on it.

“When I bought this house, my stove burnt out. So I turned to a wizard who lived not so far away, in the village of Lukovytsia. A wonderful person! He has such a beautiful garden. Even black tulips grew there! He took part in excavations. I asked him to help lay out the stove, and he said: ‘I won’t be making the stove, it’s not interesting, but if you want to take in the medicine man’s stove stone by stone and keep it well-preserved, I will take all the documentation from the scientist who dug this stove up.’ He scoffed at me and thought I would never do so. But I would carry these stones on a kayak down the Dnipro for four months — strong 90-million-year-old sandstones. When he saw my stubbornness, he agreed to help me,” Petryk said. Thus his home saw its main and the most precious item. To tell the truth, the “rare” stone was enough for a part of the stove only, and then he had to line the stove with modern-day bricks.

Historians give different explanations of the origin of the word “Trakhtemyriv.” In Petryk’s view, the interpretation is “protected world.” Another version says that Trakhtemyriv is a place where treatises were written about the world. Besides, there was a certain Traktukai, an heir to Tamerlane, who hid here from his enemies in the 15th century. His “headquarters” were located here. So the place may have been named after him. Petryk reads a lot and gets very angry when something wrong is written about Trakhtemyriv.

“It was written that the gods dropped golden plows from the sky to the Scythians here, and they all became land tillers. This prompted all ‘black archeologists’ to rush here to excavate. Then there were claims that the Cossacks had left their treasures in an underground monastery. This again made the guys take spades and run here, but now they are no longer digging: they have modern equipment,” the host says in despair.

Here are the places not to be missed:

Makivshchyna (Worship Hill). It is located in the steppe, not far from Petryk’s house.

“There are two pear trees there and, between them, the place of an ancient Slavic pagan shrine. A very strong place on a peninsula. We call it Worship Hill. Locals also call it Makivshchyna because if somebody walked exhausted on a sizzling day, he could just lie down on the ground for some time and thus recuperate his strength. This is the effect of poppy [“mak” in Ukrainian – Ed.].”

Height 222, or Three Angels. All the mystics, isotherics, and ancient warlocks considered this place a major center of power. The followers of the idea of Earth’s Spiritual Crystal claim that the crystal is right here and irradiates energy with its faces.

“A young man visits me for a treatment. When he was driving around Tibet on his motorbike, he entered a temple. When he saw that the floor was studded with human skulls, he got scared and ran away. Now he suffers from leukemia and some other incomprehensible diseases. Doctors refuse to heal him. But a sojourn on Trakhtemyriv’s Height 222 and St. Mark’s Spire stopped the growth of leucocytes in him, so now he comes here in proper time,” the Scythian says.

St. Mark’s Spire. A locality near Height 222. Legend has it that St. Mark established one of Rus’s first monasteries here.

“There was a monastery on this ridge, but nobody is allowed to enter it now. Archeologists cannot go inside. Some ‘black archeologists’ once came from Sevastopol — a well-equipped team who had dismantled devices from ships. They were warned not to go there before I did, but when they still went and switched on their equipment, they confessed to me that they had lost 300,000 dollars (all their devices burned down at once). I said to them: ‘Don’t poke about places you don’t belong to!’”

Petryk was lucky to visit the undergrounds twice. He first did it when he accompanied the visiting monks. Later, no matter how hard he was looking for this place, he could not find even one crevice. He did it for the second time seven years ago, when Scottish knights came over. Our hero entered the underground again and saw two churches with walls written over in Glagolitic. Trakhtemyriv’s only resident is convinced this proves that these churches are very ancient indeed.