This year Khmelnytsky oblast is going to host a show of about 15 hot air balloons from Ukraine and other countries. The feast will comprise six flybys over Kamianets-Podilsky and end in the North Lights spectacle on Sunday night. Staged against the backdrop of a fortress, North Lights will be what one of the organizers called “incredible extravaganza.”
The aeronauts will come to the fiesta from Kyiv, Feodosia, Kherson, Dnipropetrovsk, Lviv, Chernihiv, and other cities. It will be recalled that Ukraine’s first balloonists also came from various cities. A plaque unveiled two years ago at the Old Fortress wall reminds visitors of the first flight. There is a mistake, though, in the plaque – it mentions October, not May. In reality, on May 20, 1784, on the initiative of the Podillia-based landlord and French aristocrat Charles Guillaume de Nassau and with assistance from the Kamianets fortress commandant Jan de Witte, the first montgolfier soared over Kamianets. As Prince de Nassau witnessed the Montgolfier brothers’ first flights in 1783 in France, he decided to repeat their exploits in Podillia. The Montgolfiers succeeded in doing what others had attempted in the early 18th century. The first documented attempt to launch a hot air balloon was made on August 8, 1709, by Bartolomeu Lourenco de Gusmao, the court chaplain of Portuguese King Joao V. The chaplain failed to do this, while the French brothers were luckier.
Hot air ballooning became all the rage in 1783. France’s monopoly of the sky had come to an end: balloons were made and launched over London, Krakow (January 17, 1784), Warsaw (February 12, 1784), Rotterdam, Milan, Lviv, and Kamianets. We failed to find any authentic documents on the Lviv flight, but there are plenty of epistolary comments on the flight in Kamianets.
We can learn from a letter of artillery officer Benedict Magera to Warsaw that the above-mentioned Prince de Nassau, First Lieutenant de la Porte, the American Littlepage, and Captain Mokronoski passed through Kamianets-Podilsky en route to Istanbul in June 1784. They brought in “a better method of making balloons,” much to the delight of the fortress commandant General de Witte. Second Lieutenant B. Magera was relieved of duty for a few days to be able to make a balloon under the guidance of a trend-setting prince. “All I can say is we have managed to do it. I can boast of working more than anybody else. We launched from Kamianets a paper-made 23-ft-long and 19-ft-wide balloon which rose as high as 3,000 cubits and fell into the river Smotrych after a half mile away… The next one, which we launched for the Pasha, was big, round-shaped, 33 feet long and wide. We feared that it might fall down in the middle of the city and make a big firework show for the Turks. Those were hot air balloons.”
Does this mean the first Ukrainian flights occurred in 1784? No! Archival search was crowned with one more success: we found a letter from Macej Kasprowicz, a physics professor at the Podplawski Seminary in 1783-1793, to his colleague Jan Sniasdecki. One can read this letter today on www.3glav.com.ua, the website of the Kamianets-Podilsky-based Triglav hot air ballooning organization.
The letter dated May 29, 1784, deals with the balloon flyby on May 20 of the same year. This was attended by a certain Prince de Bassane and an anonymous first lieutenant who had flown a balloon in France. The balloon, made of double gummed paper, weighed 400 kg and was 15 meters in diameter. The flight was, naturally, part of the respected society’s plans. But when the balloon was being filled with air, a big hole suddenly appeared, and the men refused to fly. The unmanned balloon reached the altitude of about 240 m, then burst, and fell on the ground. This forced the Kamianets sky to forget about air balloons for 212 years. (Yet, who knows, archives may well present Kamianets, as well as Lviv, residents with a pleasant surprise.)
The first Ukrainian flight is traditionally celebrated in October, when the city can receive as many balloons as possible. All those who wish can join the feast: all they have to do is have a desire to fly and 1,000 hryvnias in the pocket.
