Baturyn is one of the landmark places in Ukrainian history. Baturyn’s ruins are the ruins of a European Ukraine, as some researchers claim. It is after the defeat of Ivan Mazepa that the Cossack state lost its close cultural links with Europe and began a gradual departure into the influence field of tsarist Russia. Therefore, the present-day Baturyn is a Klondike of reflections, analyses, and discoveries for serious tourists.
June 14 will see the National Historical and Cultural Preserve “Hetman’s Capital” celebrate its 20th anniversary. The preserve comprises 35 monuments now, but the main sights to see are the house of General Judge Vasyl Kochubei – the only authentic structure dating back to the Mazepa era, the palace of the last Hetman Kyrylo Rozumovsky, the Museum of Baturyn Archeology, and the Baturyn Fortress Citadel. Naturally, some buildings were restored almost from the foundation upwards. Yet this does not diminish the importance of the preserve and helps one to get a better idea of what a complicated, multi-faceted, and, at the same time, interesting phenomenon the Cossack state was.
The summer in Baturyn is a hot season. The place may sometimes receive up to 1,500 sightseers in a day. Mostly, they are children from Chernihiv or the neighboring oblasts, who arrive on school buses. “Faraway visitors do not often come here. The majority of those who visit the preserve are sightseers from Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, and partially Poltava oblasts. The other regions account for fewer than 4 percent of visitors, while foreigners are less than 1 percent,” says Natalia SERDIUK, in charge of research at the preserve and executive secretary at the newspaper Slovo Hetmanskoi stolytsi.
By all accounts, the present-day Baturyn is a peripheral town, far from the main public transport thoroughfares, so the National Preserve “Hetman’s Capital” has to address a lot of problems that usually beset regional museums. The Baturyn museum people have a largely positive, interesting, and useful experience.
HOW TO ATTRACT VISITORS
“We once conducted a poll among the visitors and asked why they came to the museum, what they wanted to see, learn and understand above all. We saw that a mere 12 percent of today’s sightseers aspire for scientific knowledge, while the majority want relaxation and emotional impressions. Visitors most of all want to touch the exhibits,” Serdiuk says. As a result, the museum people organized an exhibition, ‘Touch history,’ on the territory of Kyrylo Rozumovsky’s palace: they took some authentic palace fragments from the local residents and allowed the sightseers (mostly children) to study them on the touch, so to speak.
“Another example of an interactive approach to excursions is the Golden Wednesday event. There is a 19th-century grand piano in Rozumovsky’s palace. Every Wednesday visits to the luxury rooms, where the last Ukrainian hetman and the tsarist court’s favorite resided, are accompanied with the melodious sounds of a piano. The Hetman’s House is open in the Citadel on Wednesdays, and there are candle-lit excursions in the basement of the Kochubei House.
According to museum employees, various festivals held at “Hetman’s Capital” help very much to attract new visitors. Some of them are organized by the museum people themselves, others are held under the auspices of the Chernihiv Oblast Administration.
“Last year we held 12 culture and art events at the preserve, where other teams were involved, as well as 63 free lectures for district school pupils,” Serdiuk continues. Among the most prominent events is the Cossack Festival that has been held in Baturyn on the second Sunday of June for 21 years in a row and the Andrii Rozumovsky regional competition of young musicians. According to the Chernihiv-based historian Volodymyr Boiko (“Andrii Rozumovsky and Ludwig van Beethoven” of May 23, 2012), the Viennese Palace of the last hetman’s son “became one of the largest centers of musical art: it constantly hosted soirees and performances of an orchestra and a choir.” No less legendary are the years of friendship and professional contacts with and even material care for the great German composer Ludwig van Beethoven on the part of the Ukrainian Cossacks’ descendant (Rozumovsky awarded the composer with a life rent). So it is more than logical to hold a competition of young musicians in the Rozumovskys’ family palace. The contest was first held last year and saw the participation of 37 children from Chernihiv and Sumy oblasts.
The museum cannot always afford to organize large-scale cultural events on its own. The way out is to join forces with other cultural institutions.
“We intensified cooperation with the Baturyn House of Culture and the local ensemble Cossack’s Soul, and we hold joint events,” Serdiuk says. “We cooperate with the parish of the Holy Virgin the Protectress Church. A children’s group, organized by parishioners, stages a Nativity show every year. Together with these children and the Cossack’s Soul ensemble, we organize the event ‘To the Hetman for Christmas.’ The preserve also managed to establish cooperation with the Kyiv-based amateur theater Maskam Rad, whose company staged two shows in Baturyn last year.”
Another important feature of this museum-type institution is the ability to adjust to their visitors (in the finest sense of the word). Baturyn went to meet its sightseers halfway: the preserve changed its visiting hours on April 15 and canceled the permanent day-off on Monday.
A MUSEUM IN UKRAINE IS A NONPROFIT INSTITUTION, BUT…
“According to Hetman’s Capital associates, the institution offsets about 20 percent of maintenance expenses. Funds are also raised by holding wedding ceremonies in Kyrylo Rozumovsky’s palace. This service, as well as photographing and filming on the preserve’s territory, are popular.
But as museums are state-run institutions, they cannot flexibly spend the money they earned on their own needs. It is impossible to buy even a pen without permission from the Ministry of Culture and the Department for Cultural Heritage and Cultural Values. The cumbersome procedure of payments, known as “coordination of budgetary requests,” can last as long as six months and complicates the preserve’s work as well as makes it impossible to cooperate with private businesses, such as travel agencies, which could bring not only schoolchildren, but also adult, conscientious, and solvent tourists to Baturyn.
WHY DOES INLAND TOURISM MOST OFTEN EXIST IN THE FORM OF SCHOOL EXCURSIONS?
While there is no shortage of school excursions to Baturyn, private tourism is still to be developed. It is far more difficult to attract an adult tourist who will purposefully come to this very place to spend time. It is not enough to make interactive and interesting offers and show important historical monuments – a proper infrastructure is needed. And it is the job of not so much the museum as the local community to develop this infrastructure. All the more so that, for example, Hetman’s Capital is a key factor in the development of modern-day Baturyn. At present, 105 residents are on the preserve’s staff. Taking into account that, according to the preserve’s employees, the population of Baturyn is just 2,400, a half of which are retirement-age people and children, over 10 percent of town residents are employed in the preserve.
Yet the existing infrastructure in Baturyn does not induce tourists from remoter regions to come and stay here for several days, while it is impossible and nonproductive to visit at least the key facilities, let alone feel the vibes of the place and relish a stroll down the banks of the Seim, just in one day.
“We are planning to establish a hotel in one of the Rozumovsky palace’s side wings. This is what we really lack,” Natalia says. “If there was a good two-story hotel, this would help attract tourists, not sightseers. A sightseer comes for 24 hours at most, while a tourist comes for a longer time. Moreover, there is St. Nicholas Krupytsky Monastery in Baturyn, so pilgrimage tourism is also a very promising direction to be developed. At present, we take sightseers to the monastery, but if they come from afar, the monastery excursion sometimes begins at 7 a.m.” Visitors, at least sightseers, could be accommodated in the local boarding school whose dormitory block is vacant in the summer, but its staff refused to cooperate with the preserve because they go on vacation at this time.
Baturyn is also short of public catering facilities. The preserve’s website has a list of local cafes, but we never came across one on the day we stayed in the town. By contrast, it is cozy coffee and chocolate shops, with their inimitable atmosphere, that attract a large number of tourists in, say, Lviv. There is also a problem with public transport. To ride a dozen kilometers or so from the Bakhmach railway station to Baturyn, you may wait for a public bus for more than an hour.
Yet the museum people are not in a position to solve infrastructure problems. It is a question to, first of all, the district and oblast authorities. Of course, according to preserve employees, the authorities help them, particularly, in holding festivals and settling land disputes. But experience shows that this is insufficient for turning Baturyn into a real center of tourism.
The nearest plans of preserve development are linked with the emergence of new sights to see.
“We are planning to finish all work at the Baturyn Fortress Citadel and, in particular, open to visitors the hetman’s house which will display everyday life of the first three hetmans: Demian Mnohohrishny, Ivan Samoilovych, and Ivan Mazepa,” Natalia Serdiuk says. “We dream of making the Citadel tower accessible to all visitors, for it opens a majestic view of the River Seim. We also want to open an underpass from the Citadel church crypt to the bank of the Seim. We are planning to organize an exhibition room in another wing of the Rozumovsky palace so that we could exhibit items from other museums. This year we have also made an attempt to establish a trademark and, accordingly, a corporate style of our own. The competition is over, but we have not yet chosen one of the three variants on offer. When we make a choice, a long and costly procedure of expert examination will begin. If everything goes smoothly, we will perhaps have our own trademark, staff uniform, and document forms at the beginning of the next year. Then we will ponder the production of souvenirs.” At present, the preserve encourages souvenir trade by Baturyn entrepreneurs who are exempt from paying for trade on its territory.
The museum people are saying they will aim all their efforts at attracting people from all the regions so they can receive first-hand information on the multifaceted history of Cossacks.
