Cossack Otaman Ivan Sirko’s Skull to Be Returned to His Grave

On August 5, 2000, the 320th anniversary of the outstanding warlord’s death, his skull, now kept in the Dnipropetrovsk Historical Museum, will be returned to the crypt in the village of Kapulivka, Mykolayivka district, where the Cossack’s bones have rested for decades.

The misadventures of Ivan Sirko’s skull began in November 1967, when the steep bank with the otaman’s grave was washed out by waves of the Kakhovka Reservoir. Excavating the burial mound (kurgan), Dnipropetrovsk archeologists led by N. Krylova found a semi-rotten coffin with human remains. It was decided to rebury the latter in a concrete- sealed crypt on the other side of Kapulivka. True, before doing so, the researchers sent the otaman’s skull without undue publicity to the Moscow Miklukho-Maclay Institute of Ethnography and the famous studio of anthropologist M. Gerasimov to establish the image and make a sculptural portrait. Ivan Sirko’s second burial attracted a heavy turnout of local residents, so it was deemed unbecoming to commit him to the ground headless. They found the simplest possible way out: the coffin got another skull found during the excavations in the same mound.

Moreover, experts claim the skull belonged to a representative of the Yama (pit) culture, who lived several thousand years ago! However, the otaman’s true skull remained in Moscow for almost 25 years after its image (quite dubiously, by the way) had been restored. It was only returned in 1990, when the Nikopol area, where five Cossack Siches had once been located, was to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Ukrainian Cossacks. After the celebrations, Ivan Sirko’s skull was placed in the strongbox of the local culture department chief, where it lay collecting dust for another seven years until it was handed over to the Dnipropetrovsk Historical Museum.

Meanwhile, enthusiasts and area researchers continued to plead to all governmental levels that the popular hero’s remains be allowed “to rest in peace,” as Orthodox custom prescribes. The Ivan Sirko case accumulated all kinds of correspondence between the museum and the authorities. As it is clear now, all that was needed was the final solution from the top and earmarking a small amount of money to bury the skull, for budgetary funds do not even suffice to pay wages to the living.

In any case, it will apparently not be easy to organize a decent burial of the otaman’s remains. The Kapulivka memorial has been grossly desecrated by local vandals. The second sarcophagus over Ivan Sirko’s tomb has also broken time (the first one was made of bulletproof glass), the cross on the mound was bent because the vandals wanted to rip the parts made of nonferrous metals off. Also defiled were commemorative signs in the places where Cossack Siches had been situated. The unknown culprits even contrived to carry away a 2.5-ton granite boulder from Tokmaksky Island. According to prominent Nikopol local lore expert Pavlo Bohush, twenty seven out of thirty nonferrous metal commemorative plaques and stones have been stolen over the past few years in his native city and the suburbs, where Bohdan Khmelnytsky launched the Ukrainian people’s revolution! Quite recently, Mr. Bohush says, miscreants even walked off with a notice board from the premises of the public prosecutor’s office. Meanwhile, people in Nikopol and the nearby Kapulivka hope the Cossack shrines will have been put in order by August. The more so that the President himself is expected to attend the funeral of Ivan Sirko’s remains.