Buried in His Brother’s Sarcophagus

Prior Vikenty lifted the heavy lid, and the dark underground heaved a sigh of eternity. Over the 350 years of its existence, the Church of the Holy Assumption has sunk more than a meter into the ground. This is why the wide and high steps to the crypt, where the temple’s founder, prominent seventeenth -century political figure Adam Kysil, found his final repose, do not fit the floor later laid. Going down the steps, you have to carefully hold onto the wall.

A small raised coffin contains what has remained of his body. Prior Vikenty says this is the skull and a few bones, while Hennady Hulko, chief of the migrations, nationalities and religions department at the Volyn Oblast Administration, recalls a person who boasted playing soccer with this skull in the early 1960s, when the temple, like hundreds of others in Volyn, was closed and the crypt was desecrated... A devout Orthodox (for, as he wrote in his spiritual testament, “my ancestors have adhered to this faith for six centuries”), Adam Kysil had three cloisters with churches founded and built. The Nyzkynychi Monastery, where he was buried in accordance with his will, was erected in memory of his relatives at an old churchyard with the grave of the magnate’s great- grandfather, father, and uncle. This village was the ancestral estate of the Kysil family of the Ukrainian nobility. A magnificent five-domed church of the Assumption was built on a very high hill towering over the area for many miles around. Next to it stands a still-vacant monastic dormitory, with seven monks so far living in an ordinary Nyzkynychi village house a mile or so away. Nyzkynychi was the first parish of the current Prior of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, Bishop Pavlo. It is thanks to his blessing and support that the Kysil sarcophagus was restored, once something almost unthinkable.

The Nyzkynychi church has been damaged repeatedly during the past 350 years. Most probably, among those who did so were Charles XII’s Swedes, later defeated in the Battle of Poltava, for they were also not averse to desecrating “Polish” graves. Father Volodymyr, an old priest from the neighboring village of Tyshkovychi, who was sent here from Nyzkynychi (where the church was closed) during the communist crackdown on religion, told the following legend “about a good czar.” Somewhere in the 1920s Nyzkynychi was allegedly visited by the then president of Poland. The local Poles expected him to turn what was known as the Kysil church over to the Catholics. But the president said that, “Since this church has always been Orthodox, let it remain so.” Still, in the thirties, some unknown persons opened the sealed sarcophagus of Kysil and walked off with his mace and colors.

But the gravest harm was done in the not so far back 1960s by communist iconoclasts. The photos of the desecrated sarcophagus make one shudder. The strong brass eye must have been hit with a sledgehammer, for it is totally bent. The ungodly villains also grabbed Kysil’s bust-sized tomb statue in a recess framed with baroque-style marble carvings. The voyevoda (military governor — Ed.) is depicted clad in armor. Falling down on the temple floor, the statue split into two parts, but, luckily, Lviv restorers have managed to almost restore its original image.

Did Adam Kysil expect such treatment from posterity? The Assumption Church wall, just beneath the sculptured bust, has a carved Latin inscription enumerating the merits of the representative of a glorious Ukrainian Orthodox noble dynasty. “Wayfarer! Halt and read. This marble slab tells you about a glorious descendant of the Swiatold dynasty (this forebear was named Kysil for military gallantry and shrewdness around the turn of the eleventh century by Kyivan Prince Volodymyr Sviatoslavovych — Author), the pride and hope of the state, Adam Kysil of Brusylov, who was castellan of Chernihiv, then voyevoda of Bratslav and Kyiv; who showed resoluteness and farsightedness in war and won the Battle of Zygmunt, and, in the times of Volodyslav, conducted successful operations against Moscow. He also distinguished himself near Khotyn against the Turks and in Prussia against the Swedes.”

It is Adam Kysil who tells the Polish king in the film, With Fire and Sword, “If Poland starts a war against the Cossacks, we will lose the state!” An effective diplomat, he mediated for fourteen years in the talks between the Polish Kingdom and the Ukrainian Hetmanate.

Adam Kysil never resolved the main dilemma of his life: loyalty to the Polish nobility once began to clash with his innate sense of belonging to the Ukrainian nation and the Orthodox Church. While the Poles called him “a rascal, viper, slave, and Ruthenian,” the Ukrainians said, “Although your bones are Ruthenian, they have grown over with Polish flesh.”

We all know the Kyiv Mohyla Academy. But it would be more correct to call it Mohyla Kysil Academy, for, while Petro Mohyla was its “soul,” i.e., spiritual founder, Adam Kysil was its “body” or, in modern parlance, donor and patron.

When the Nyzkynychi Monastery was restored a few years ago, the monastic fraternity decided to pay tribute to its founder. Although the church was closed in the early 1960s, thank God it still remained on the roster (a real wonder in those times), which kept the militant atheists at bay. Parishioners found in the Kyiv region a very distant relation of Adam Kysil’s, an influential lady by all accounts, who visited Volyn three times and managed to stop the process.

The sarcophagus, restored in and brought from Kyiv, is so far kept in the Assumption Church. Also restored were the clan’s coats of arms and the almost destroyed battle scenes on its sides. There is a plausible explanation of why the sarcophagus reads “Mykola of Brusylov, Cherkasy, Synytsia. Warden. Colonel,” while it contains Adam (the related materials are available at the Ossolinsky Foundation in the Lviv Research Library). The sarcophagus was intended for a brother of Adam Kysil’s, also a warlord and a diplomat who died near Vinnytsia at the hands of Ivan Bohun’s Cossacks: the latter drowned the Polish dragoons in the South Buh. In those times, people would prepare sarcophaguses for themselves beforehand.

The sarcophagus will soon be carried into the crypt and receive a coffin with the human remains, and we hope Voyevoda Adam Kysil will at last find his eternal rest.