Notes for a class discussion

CONTENTS

Practical Class 2 Origins of Ukrainian culture 2

Practical Class 3 Culture of Kievan Rus’ 22

Practical Class 4 Renaissance influences in Ukrainian culture 34

Practical Class 5 The phenomenon of Ukrainian baroque 42

Practical Class 6 Rival strategies in Ukrainian culture of the late XVIII- mid-XIX centuries 51

Practical Class 7 Ukrainian culture on the path of national revival (1850s-1921) 66

Practical Class 8 Ukrainian culture in the USSR 97

Practical Class 2

Origins of Ukrainian Culture

1. Mythology as a form of culture.

2. Pre-Slavic Cultures on Ukrainian lands.

3. Pre-Christian culture of ancient Slavs.

Notes for a class discussion

1. Myth (Gr. mythos – story, narration) was the primal worldview based on emotional and imaginative comprehension of the world. It was generated by human fear of unknown natural phenomena, diseases, death. So far as people could not explain real causes of many phenomena they had endowed them with supernatural character. Myth explained natural phenomena, the origins of the world and humans. It satisfied human urge towards cognition, defined patterns of conduct, transmitted collective experience from generation to generation and assured sustainability for society. Myths shaped models and standards of human conduct. Myths were told side by side with rituals, thus people could listen to narrations and experience them every time as commemoration of the events from the myth. Mythological consciousness was the first integrating form of culture. Mythology as the embodiment of the integrity of human being and nature was reflected almost in all spheres of primal life: archaic consciousness did not distinguish the soul and the body, a thought and a feeling, an individual and a group. Myth was the first form of human cultural activity. It contained preliminary forms of arts, science, philosophy, and religion.

Integrating forms of religious experience were totemism – a system of beliefs in kinship with animal or plant; animism (from Lat. anima – soul) – a system of beliefs in existence of souls in animals, plants, rocks, thunder, in close link of spiritual and material worlds, and integrating of humans and non-humans; fetishism (from Lat. facticius – artificial) – a system of beliefs in supernatural powers of a man-made objects, like amulets and talismans.

Mythology of Indo-European peoples, the main population of Ukrainian lands, contained some features that were common for all of them. The World Tree was one of the most symbols of Indo-Europeans. The World Tree was an oak tree, which symbolized three levels of the universe: its crown represented the sky, the realm of heavenly deities; its roots represented the underworld, the realm of the dead; and the trunk was the middle of the universe and represented the world of people and nature. Also Indo-Europeans had the cult of Mother-Goddess and supported the idea of bilateral arrangement of the world (good-evil, black-white, beautiful-ugly).

2. In 1908 the very first archeological remains at the territory of Ukraine (ca 18 000 BC) were discovered at Mazine site on the Desna, near Novgorod Siverskyi. Archeological excavations exposed “Paleolithic Venues” – mammoth bone carved female torsos, which were the symbols of fertility.

The first civilization at the territory of Ukraine was Cucuteni-Trypillian culture, discovered at the Romanian village Cucuteni and at Ukrainian Trypillia near Kiev in 1884 and 1896, correspondently The Cucuteni-Trypillian culture, also known as Cucuteni culture (from Romanian), Trypillian culture (from Ukrainian) or Tripolie culture (from Russian), is a late Neolithic archaeological culture which flourished between ca. 5500 BC and 2750 BC, from the Carpathian Mountains to the Dniester and Dnieper regions in modern-day Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine, encompassing an area of more than 35, 000 km² (13, 500 square miles). At its peak the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture built the largest settlements in Neolithic Europe, some of which had populations of up to 15, 000 inhabitants.

One of the most notable aspects of this culture was that every 60 to 80 years the inhabitants of a settlement would burn their entire village. The reason for the burning of the settlements is a subject of debate among scholars; many of the settlements were reconstructed several times on top of earlier ones, preserving the shape and the orientation of the older buildings. One example of this, at the Poduri, Romania site, revealed a total of thirteen habitation levels that were constructed on top of each other over a period of many years.

The culture was initially named after the village of Cucuteni in Iaş i County, Romania, where the first objects associated with it were discovered. In 1884 the Teodor T. Burada, a scholar from the nearby city of Iaş i, visited the tell (a hill or mound formed by long-term human occupation) located next to the village of Cucuteni where he unearthed fragments of pottery and terracotta figurines. After Burada had shown his findings to other academics in Iaş i a team, including Burada, the poet Nicolae Beldiceanu and archeologists Grigore Butureanu, Dimitrie C. Butculescu and George Diamandi, decided to carry out further explorations of the site, and subsequently began the first archeological excavations at Cucuteni in the spring of 1885. The findings of this initial work were announced in articles written in 1885 by Beldiceanu and in 1889 by Butureanu. Then in 1889 two of the Romanian scholars travelled to Paris to present the Cucuteni findings at international conferences: Butureanu at the International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archaeology and Diamandi at a meeting of the Socié té d’Anthropologie de Paris.

Simultaneously, around 1887, (possibly 1893 or 1896), the Czech archaeologist Vicenty Khvoika uncovered the first of close to one hundred Cucuteni-Trypillian settlements in Ukraine. Khvoika announced this discovery at the 11th Congress of Archaeologists in 1897, which is considered the official date of the discovery of the Trypillian culture in Ukraine. In 1897 similar objects were excavated in the village of Trypillia (Ukrainian: Трипiлля) in Kiev Oblast, Ukraine. As a result, this culture became identified in Soviet, Russian, and Ukrainian publications as the 'Tripolie' (or 'Tripolye'), 'Tripolian' or 'Trypillian' culture. Excavation and study of these Ukrainian sites began in earnest in 1909.

Later scholars came to recognize that Romanian 'Cucuteni' and Ukrainian 'Trypillian' sites belonged to the same archaeological culture, usually known in the English-language as the 'Cucuteni-Trypillian' or 'Cucuteni-Tripolye' culture. Though older terms such as 'Cucuteni', 'Trypillian', or 'Tripolie' are still frequently used, they are now considered synonyms.

Geography

Members of this culture belonged to tribal social groups, scattered over an area of southeast Europe encompassing territories in present-day Romania, Moldova and Ukraine. The important physical features of the land were rolling plains, river valleys, the Black Sea, and the Carpathian Mountains, which were covered by a mixed forest in the west, that gave way to the open grasslands of the steppes in the east. The climate during the time that this culture flourished has been named the Holocene climatic optimum, and featured cool, wet winters and warm, moist summers. These conditions would have created a very favorable climate for agriculture in this region.

As of 2003, about 3000 sites of Cucuteni-Trypillian culture have been identified. J. P. Mallory reports that the " …culture is attested from well over a thousand sites in the form of everything from small villages to vast settlements consisting of hundreds of dwellings surrounded by multiple ditches."

Settlements

In terms of overall size, some of Cucuteni-Trypillian sites, such as Talianki (with a population of 15, 000 and covering an area of some 450 hectares – 1100 acres) in the province of Uman Raion, Ukraine, are as large as (or perhaps even larger than) the more famous city-states of Sumer in the Fertile Crescent, and these Eastern European settlements predate the Sumerian cities by more than half of a millennium.

Archaeologists have uncovered an astonishing wealth of artifacts from these ancient ruins. The largest collections of Cucuteni-Trypillian artifacts are to be found in museums in Russia, Ukraine, and Romania, including the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and the Archaeology Museum Piatra Neamţ in Romania. However, smaller collections of artifacts are kept in many local museums scattered throughout the region.

These settlements underwent periodical acts of destruction and re-creation, as they were burned and then rebuilt every 60–80 years. Some scholars have theorized that the inhabitants of these settlements believed that every house symbolized an organic, almost living, entity. Each house, including its ceramic vases, ovens, figurines and innumerable objects made of perishable materials, shared the same circle of life, and all of the buildings in the settlement were physically linked together as a larger symbolic entity. As with living beings, the settlements may have been seen as also having a life cycle of death and rebirth.

The houses of the Cucuteni-Trypillian settlements were constructed in several general ways:

Wattle and daub homes.

Log homes, called (Ukrainian: площадки ploš č adki).

Semi-underground homes called Bordei.

Some Cucuteni-Trypillian homes were two-storeys tall, and evidence shows that the members of this culture sometimes decorated the outsides of their homes with many of the same red-ochre complex swirling designs that are to be found on their pottery. Most houses had thatched roofs and wooden floors covered with clay.

Diet

Cucuteni-Trypillian sites have yielded substantial evidence to prove that the inhabitants practiced agriculture, raised domestic livestock, and hunted wild animals for food. Archaeological evidence also indicates that primitive plowing was done by the farmers of the Cucuteni-Trypillian settlements. Cultivating the soil, tending livestock, and harvesting the crops were probably the main occupations of most of the members of this society. There is also evidence that they may have raised bees. Although wine grapes were cultivated by these people, there is no solid evidence to date to prove that they actually made wine from them. The cereal grains were ground and baked as unleavened bread in clay ovens or on heated stones in the hearth fireplace in the house.

The archaeological remains of animals found at Cucuteni-Trypillian sites indicate that the inhabitants practiced animal husbandry. The remains of dogs have also been found. Archaeologists have uncovered both the remains as well as artistic depictions of the horse in Cucuteni-Trypillian sites. However, whether these finds were of domesticated or wild horses is a matter of some debate.

In addition to farming and raising livestock, members of the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture supplemented their diet with hunting. They used traps to catch their prey, as well as various weapons, including the bow-and-arrow, the spear, and clubs. To help them in stalking game, they sometimes disguised themselves with camouflage.

Ritual and religion

Some Cucuteni-Trypillian communities have been found that contain a special building located in the center of the settlement, which archaeologists have identified as sacred sanctuaries. Artifacts have been found inside these sanctuaries, some of them having been intentionally buried in the ground within the structure, that are clearly of a religious nature, and have provided insights into some of the beliefs, and perhaps some of the rituals and structure, of the members of this society. Additionally, artifacts of an apparent religious nature have also been found within many domestic Cucuteni-Trypillian homes.

Many of these artifacts are clay figurines or statues. Archaeologists have identified many of these as fetishes or totems, which are believed to be imbued with powers that can help and protect the people who look after them. These Cucuteni-Trypillian figurines have become known popularly as Goddesses, however, this term is not necessarily accurate for all female anthropomorphic clay figurines, as the archaeological evidence suggests that different figurines were used for different purposes (such as for protection), and so are not all representative of a Goddess. There have been so many of these figurines discovered in Cucuteni-Trypillian sites that many museums in eastern Europe have a sizeable collection of them, and as a result, they have come to represent one of the more readily-identifiable visual markers of this culture to many people.

One of the unanswered questions regarding the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture is the small number of artifacts associated with funerary rites. Although very large settlements have been explored by archaeologists, the evidence for mortuary activity is almost invisible. Making a distinction between the eastern Tripolye and the western Cucuteni regions of the Cucuteni-Trypillian geographical area, American archaeologist Douglass W. Bailey writes:

There are no Cucuteni cemeteries and the Tripolye ones that have been discovered are very late.

The discovery of skulls is more frequent then other parts of the body, however because there has not yet been a comprehensive statistical survey done of all of the skeletal remains discovered at Cucuteni-Trypillian sites, precise post excavation analysis of these discoveries cannot be accurately determined at this time. Still, many questions remain concerning these issues, as well as why there seems to have been no male remains found at all. The only definite conclusion that can be drawn from archeological evidence is that in the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture, in the vast majority of cases, the bodies were not formally deposited within the settlement area.

Technological developments

At its height, the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture would have been one of the most technologically-advanced societies on earth, producing woven textiles, exquisitely-fine and beautifully-decorated ceramics, and a wide variety of tools and weapons, as well as developing large-scale salt production, new house construction methods, and agricultural and animal husbandry techniques.

Salt Works

What may well be the world's oldest saltworks was discovered at the Poiana Slatinei archaeological site next to a salt spring in Lunca, Neamt County, Romania. Archaeological evidence indicates that salt production began there as long ago as 6050 BC., making it perhaps the oldest known saltworks in the world.^[ Evidence based on discoveries in Solca, Cacica, Lunca, Oglinzi, and Cucuieţ i, indicates that the people of the Precucuteni Culture were extracting salt from the salt-laden spring-water through the process of Briquetage. First, the brackish water from the spring was boiled in large pottery vessels, producing a dense brine. The brine was then heated in a ceramic briquetage vessel until all moisture was evaporated, with the remaining crystallized salt adhering to the inside walls of the vessel. Then the briquetage vessel was broken open, and the salt was scraped from the shards.

The salt extracted from this operation may have had a direct correlation to the rapid growth of this society's population soon after its initial production began. Salt from this operation probably played a very important role in the Neolithic economy of the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture through its entire duration.