Янголи у декорі палацу Івана Мазепи в Батурині

Description

The Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine interrupted the Canada-Ukraine excavations in Baturyn (Chernihiv oblast), the former capital of Cossack Hetmanate. In spite of that, scholars at CIUS and Chernihiv University have continued their research on the town’s history and culture by analyzing the archaeological source materials collected during extensive excavations of 1995–2021. The Baturyn Project is sponsored by CIUS.

This project’s twelfth annual booklet (Toronto, 2023, 40 pp. in Ukrainian, 49 colour illustrations) closely examines for the first time the rare glazed ceramic and terracotta tiles (kakhli) bearing the masterfully executed images of cherubs or putti. These tiles adorned stoves in the palace of Hetman Ivan Mazepa (1687–1708) and in several Cossack elite dwellings in Baturyn, remnants of which have been excavated. Authors show the Renaissance origin of this religious and decorative motif and its analogies in the ceramic stove tiles, plates, icons, and architectural embellishments of early modern Kyiv, Western Ukraine, Poland, and Italy, as well as the influences of the European baroque arts on the hetman capital city, which were promoted by Mazepa.

This brochure is richly illustrated with photos and computer graphic reconstructions of several broken glazed ceramic and terracotta tiles as well as ornate multicoloured majolica tiled stove of the destroyed hetman’s principal residence. These reconstructions and analysis testify to the vibrancy of ceramic arts, Western cultural orientation of Mazepa and the Cossack elite in Baturyn, and the hetman capital’s dynamic development within the sphere of European Christian civilization. After the suppression of Mazepa’s anti-Moscow insurrection and after the ravaging of Baturyn by tsarist troops in 1708, the manufacturing of ceramic stove tiles with relief images in the Ukrainian baroque style never recovered in the town. Only thanks to the 25-year excavations of its ruins archaeologists have discovered, recreated, and examined various artistic stove tiles from the razed Cossack capital.