Republica Press

Your Business & Political News Source

REPUBLICA PRESS
Your Business & Political News Source

Ukraine’s Burial Mounds Offer Meaning in a Heap of History

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DNIPRO, Ukraine — Belching diesel exhaust, a bulldozer cut into a 4,000-year-old burial mound, peeling back the soil to reveal the mysteries hidden inside, including a skeleton.

For archaeologists, this excavation in the flatlands of eastern Ukraine holds the promise of discovery. For a developer, it clears the way for new country homes.

In recent years, government archaeologists, developers and farmers, who sometimes also level burial mounds in their fields to ease plowing, have seemingly been the only parties interested in the fate of Ukraine’s vast constellation of ancient graves. And few have paid much heed to preserving the dirt piles.

Hoping to correct this history of neglect, a Ukrainian nongovernmental group is agitating for the preservation of the burial mounds of Scythians and other ancient warrior cultures, partly on the grounds that they hold particular significance for a country at war today.

Guardians of the Mounds, two years ago. It has been gaining traction as a national movement since.

Russian invasion, as the Russian Army massed tanks and soldiers on Ukraine’s border, a succession of nomadic warrior cultures, including the most famous, the Scythians, built the mounds on the steppe.

displayed by the thousands at museums in Kyiv, the capital, are mere distractions from the message of the mounds, Mr. Klykavka said. And even finding the treasures in a mound does not justify dismantling it, he said.

smoking marijuana. “The Scythians enjoy it so much they howl with pleasure,” the Greek historian Herodotus wrote. They nonetheless rebuffed an invasion of their homeland by Persia, the most powerful empire of the time.

Criticism by the Guardian of the Mounds is misplaced, said Dmytro Teslenko, the chief archaeologist for the city of Dnipro, where he oversees an excavation done with a bulldozer but also shovels and brushes.

Union of Archaeologists of Ukraine. “It happens with the tacit consent or with the active participation of local bodies of cultural heritage protection,” which are eager to excavate for the possibility of finding funerary goods and less concerned about the actual dirt piles.

Members of Guardians of the Mounds, in contrast, have been rebuilding mounds. Mr. Klykavka has piled up soil on six leveled burial mound sites in a remote field north of Kyiv which holds 18 graves.

“I always feel good here,” he said, standing atop one of the mounds.

Andrew E. Kramer reported from Moscow.

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