Scythian Mounds Being Privatized in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast — Five to Six a Hectare

In the course of agrarian reform and land distribution 70% of the ancient burial mounds of the nomadic peoples that populated the territory of what is now Ukraine have become private property. Many of then were later razed to the ground. According to Lidiya Holubchyk, director of the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Center for the Conservation of Historical and Cultural Treasures, mounds are at risk today because of flawed Ukrainian legislation, and the state is now finding it difficult to reclaim its unique historical monuments. Ms. Holubchyk says that it became possible to “privatize” the mounds because of a number of drawbacks in the first draft of the Land Code. Its authors, who banned the removal of “especially valuable lands” from state ownership, failed to specify that the historical and cultural monuments preservation service is one of the institutions to be consulted. This error was corrected only in the second draft of the code that took effect on January 1, 2002. “However, over the two years since the agrarian reform got off to a start,” says Ms. Holubchyk, “the regional land-management authority has been allocating land without consulting us and denying us any chance to participate in decision- making. As a result, almost all the ancient mounds were included in the land plots being distributed. Further aggravating the problem was the fact that the agrarian reform was literally being ‘pushed through,’ while all the maps that indicated historical monuments had been drawn on the basis of visual estimates rather than geodetic surveys.”

The center’s director says that law-enforcement authorities have been looking into illegal allocations of the mounds for years. Since local courts are passing relevant decisions in this connection, this process may take years to conclude. Landowners do not want to part with their land, while officials are in no rush to admit their mistakes, and even abuses. “It would be possible to speed up the recovery of historical monuments by buying them out, which is provided for in the law on cultural heritage preservation. But this matter, and others, requires heavy funding,” Ms. Holubchyk says.

President Yushchenko’s recent instruction ordering a comprehensive investigation into the way the authorities observe the law and the Cabinet’s guidelines on land management and conservation has given some hope to the center’s employees. Incidentally, the head of state entrusted this job to National Security and Defense Council Secretary Petro Poroshenko, while local commissions set up for this purpose would be headed by governors. But it soon became clear that they were intending to deal with other “especially valuable lands,” such as health resorts, recreational riversides, woodlands, and preserves. By all accounts, no one cares about the barbarously destroyed historical mounds and prehistoric human settlements, which number about 12,000 in Dnipropetrovsk oblast alone. Ms. Holubchyk is going to plead with Governor Yuriy Yekhanurov about this matter. Still, the regional authorities are well aware of the problem of the devastation of the “steppe pyramids” in which archeologists have found masterpieces of Scythian gold, including the world-famous pectoral.

Nevertheless, Dnipropetrovsk regional bureaucrats often take a singular view of many things. At a recent press conference Volodymyr Fenenko, who is in charge of land resources management, complained about the commission’s performance, declaring that “unless they are plowed up,” the dilapidated mounds would...be spreading weeds and ambrosia in the fields, and in some rural areas in the oblast there are still “five or six of them per hectare.”