The Yavornytsky History Museum in Dnipropetrovsk hosts a unique exposition, Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s Emblems of Power as Hetman of Ukraine, initiated by and organized in collaboration with the XXI Century Ukraine Foundation for Intellectual Cooperation chaired by People’s Deputy Bohdan Hubsky. Among the items on display are rarities from six museums in four European countries: Sweden, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine (e.g., Khmelnytsky’s personal standard from Stockholm’s military museum, kept for more than three centuries among the trophies of Swedish kings; hetman’s mace and portrait from the Military of Museum of Warsaw; saber, whip, and two goblets from the Czartoryski Foundation at the National Museum of Krakow; bowl for holy water from Moscow’s State Historical Museum, and Khmelnytsky’s hat from the Ukrainian Museum of National History). Yuri Savchuk, senior fellow at the Ukrainian National Academy’s Institute of Ukrainian History, said in addressing the opening ceremony that the exposition is unique because Khmelnytsky’s symbols of power have been put together for the first time in several centuries and displayed in the hetman’s native land, if only temporarily, in a place that had once accommodated five out of eight components of the Zaporozhzhian Sich and where the Cossack Revolution began in 1648 (the display has toured Kyiv, Lviv, and Cossack capital of Chyhyryn).
For more than 300 years of traveling from one country to the next, some of Khmelnytsky’s insignia and personal belongs have suffered damage. Experts note that what happens to such rarities is a mirror reflection of Ukrainian history, marked by devastating wars, foreign invasions, and other cataclysms. Evidence of this is the story of Ukraine’s largest collection of Cossack artifacts, originating from the Dnipropetrovsk History Museum at the turn of the twentieth century, put together by its first curator Academician Dmytro Yavornytsky. It boasted some 90,000 items before World War II. The war saw over two-thirds removed, with some items destroyed by fire, others looted, ending up in former Soviet/socialist countries and in the West, just like Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s kleinody or insignia of power, reports The Day’s Vadym RYZHKOV.
