The Metropolitan’s House museum at the National Sanctuary “Sophia of Kyiv” hosted a reconstruction-exhibition, “A Cross and a Saber: Metropolitan Petro Mohyla of Kyiv (1597-1647).” It was not just a step into Ukraine’s past, into the glorious era of Cossackdom. The exhibition was about the booming development of Ukrainian art in the 17th century and Petro Mohyla, an outstanding historical, religious, and cultural figure of that time.
The exhibited items illustrated two periods in the life of Petro Mohyla – military service in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in his young years (before taking monastic vows) and religious activities of him as Archimandrite of the Kyivan Cave Monastery and then Metropolitan of Kyiv, Halych, and All Rus’.
The exposition started with a historical reconstruction of the early- and mid-17th-century military gear and weapons, including a red zhupan (short caftan), a cuirass with a gorget, a saber and vambraces, and a leather bag (“tashka”). This is the way Ukrainian warriors were dressed and armed in the 1621 Battle of Khotyn, when the armies of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Ukrainian Cossacks won a victory over the troops of Turkish Sultan Osman II. The exhibition also displayed cannon balls and the war gear of a well-off warrior of the 17th-century Crimean Khanate (laminated armor, a khalat, a bascinet with an aventail, a chechuga-type saber, a whip, and a fire striker).
It is known that after taking part in the Battle of Khotyn, Petro Mohyla began to visit Kyiv, where he eventually joined the Kyiv Brotherhood. His educational and literary activities, the development of publishing facilities, particularly the Kyivan Cave Monastery’s print shop when he was the monastery’s archimandrite, were reflected at the exhibition by means of valuable old prints, church accessories, and common items.
When Petro Mohyla was the Metropolitan, he began a comprehensive renovation of St. Sophia Cathedral and its ornamentation, which lasted from 1633 until 1647. The copies of Abraham van Westerveld’s drawings (1651), which depict St. Sophia Cathedral after the renovation, fragments of a 17th-cenury glazed-tile stove with a picture of a bull’s head, illustrate the second period in the life of the Metropolitan of Kyiv, Halych, and All Rus’. “Visitors can also see Mohyla’s coat of arms, reconstructed in 1946, which once adorned St. Sophia Cathedral’s iconostasis, and some non-reconstructed elements. These are ceramic letters in the caption to the coat of arms which used to be located at the cathedral’s altar in the 17th century,” says museum research associate Denys Borysov. “The exhibition ‘A Cross and a Saber: Metropolitan Petro Mohyla of Kyiv (1597-1647)’ is one in the series of museum expositions about outstanding Ukrainian church figures. Earlier, the Metropolitan’s House museum staged exhibitions that reflected the activities of Metropolitan Rafail Zaborovsky (1676-1747) and Metropolitan Yevhenii Bolkhovytinov (1767-1837).”
