Duma about the Lament of the: Captives

The tradition of suffering at the hands of the Ottoman Turks was embedded in the Ukrainian psyche through the recitation of epic tales known as dumy. An excerpt from one of the most famous dumy follows.

On the holy day of Sunday, it wasn’t the grey eagles screaming.

But the poor captives weeping in bitter slavery, Raising their arms, shaking their chains. Begging and imploring the merciful Lord: ‘Send us, O Lord, a fine rain from the sky And wild wind from the Dnieper steppe! Maybe a swift wave will rise on the Black Sea, Maybe it will break the Turkish galley loose from its anchor! Oh, we have had enough of this accursed Turkish slavery; The iron chains have dug into our legs,

They have cut our white young Cossack flesh to the yellow hone.’

They spilled innocent Christian blood.

The poor captives began to see Christian blood on their bodies.

They began to curse the Turkish land, and the infidel faith:

*O Turkish land, O infidel faith,

O separation from fellow Christians,

You have parted many from their fathers and mothers.

Brothers from their sisters.

Husbands from their faithful wives!

Liberate, O Lord, all the poor captives

From bitter Turkish slavery,

From infidel captivity!

Let them reach the quiet waters,

The bright stars

The merry homeland.

The Christian people, The Christian cities!’

source: Ukrainian Dumy, translated by George Tarnawsky and Patricia Kilina (Toronto and Cambridge, Mass. 1979), p. 23.

The seemingly unbounded natural wealth of this Ukrainian borderland out­weighed the danger of living there, so that as early as in the fifteenth century a few individuals from more settled areas in the northwest began to venture down the Dnieper and its tributaries in search of fish, wild buffalo and horses, and the eggs of wildfowl. In 1590, a Polish writer described Ukraine as: ‘the richest part of the Polish state.

At first, these expeditions in search of food lasted only a few weeks; soon, how­ever, they lasted whole summers, long enough to plant a crop and harvest it from the rich soil. Among the earliest seekers of wealth were members of the lesser gen­try and townspeople, groups whose status in Polish-Lithuanian society was steadily being eroded by the power of the great landowning magnates in Ukraine. Tales of the steppes’s natural wealth spread rapidly, and before long the gentry and towns­people were joined by even larger numbers of peasants, some of whom came from as far west as Podolia and Galicia. The landlords in the north were not about to miss an opportunity to increase their own wealth, and they demanded a portion of the foodstuffs and natural wealth their peasants brought back from the Ukrain­ian wilderness. Not surprisingly, the more daring decided not to return for the winter at all, but to make permanent homes in this no-man’s-land.

The rise of the Cossacks

This new mode of existence - traveling to the wilderness in order to fish, hunt, perhaps do some farming, and then returning home in the winter or, eventually, remaining in the wilderness permanently - came to be known as the Cossack way of life. Indeed, the danger from Nogay slave-raiding parties was ever present, and to cope with the threat the Ukrainian peasants- and townspeople-turned-frontier dwellers were forced to protect themselves and become skilled in the art of self­defense. Before long, self-defense was transformed by some into offensive attacks against Nogay slave-raiding parties and Tatar trade caravans.

Besides these individuals, drawn to the Ukrainian steppe by its natural wealth and the prospect of booty from raids against Tatar caravans, there was another kind of Cossack. This was the freebooting warrior of various social and ethnic ori­gin who entered the service of Lithuanian and Polish frontier officials or of the powerful magnates, who usually maintained their own armies. In fact, the very first group to be systematically described as Cossacks were Tatar renegades from the Crimean khan’s armies who had been hired by Lithuanian and Muscovite rul­ers. This helps to explain why the very term Cossack - later associated exclusively with anti-Tatar Slavic groups - probably derives from the Turkish term qazaq, meaning a freebooting warrior or raider.

By the fifteenth century, it was common practice for Lithuanian frontier offi­cials (yoievody and district starosty) to hire Cossacks to help defend the grand duchy’s frontier fortresses against Tatar raiding parties, especially in the Kiev and Bratslav palatinates. Because of their residence in frontier towns, these military forces were referred to as ‘town Cossacks’ (horodovi kozaky), and in some contem­porary documents (especially Muscovite), all Cossacks came to be called cherkasy, after the name of one of the fortified towns (Cherkasy) where many were concen­trated. At least until the end of the sixteenth century, the town Cossacks were led by appointees of the king, usually local district starosty, who were called hetmans by their followers. Nor did these Cossacks serve only in a defensive capacity. Beginning in 1489, Cossacks led by crown-appointed hetmans attacked Tatar cara­vans and Turkish bases not only in the Crimea, but as far south as the Balkans and Anatolia.

The Cossacks living farther south, away from the towns, built their own forti­fied centers, which, while frequently changing location, generally carried the name sich. The first sich was built on the island of Little Khortytsia (Mala Khorty­tsia) in the Dnieper River, south of the rapids below the waterway’s first major bend. Because the first sich and the several subsequent ones were set up beyond the rapids (in Ukrainian: zaporohamy), the Cossacks living there soon came to be known as the Zaporozhian Cossacks or the Zaporozhian Host. This name was applied in order to distinguish them from other Cossacks who at the same time had begun to develop in similar circumstances farther east along the southern Muscovite frontier and who were known as Don Cossacks. The land on both sides of the Dnieper River where the Zaporozhian Cossacks established their sich mili­tary fortresses was called Zaporozhia.

It is to Zaporozhia that townspeople and an increasing number of peasants from Ukrainian and Belarusan lands farther north and west (Galicia, Volhynia, western Podolia) came in an attempt to escape the increasing burdens of Poland’s manorial system. They were joined by other adventurers of various social back­grounds and origin (Romanians/Moldavians, Tatars, Turks, Jews) who desired to live within the government-less environment of the Cossack steppe. The newcom­ers settled in the sich itself as well as in the nearby wilderness of Zaporozhia on both banks of the Dnieper River. It should be noted that during these early dec­ades, at least until the end of the sixteenth century, the differentiation between town Cossacks farther north and those based in the sich in Zaporozhia was not pronounced, since both recognized the same hetman as their leader and often joined together in expeditions against the Tatars.

The sich itself was a fortified center surrounded in part by high walls of wood as well as by lowland swamps or tributaries of the Dnieper River. Behind the walls were living quarters for resident Cossacks - only men were permitted inside - whose number in later years sometimes reached as high as 10,000. The central square contained a church, a school, and the residence of the community’s lead­ers. Beyond the walls was a marketplace (bazar) where goods from cities and forti­fied centers farther north (Kiev, Kaniv, Cherkasy) and from the Crimea and the Ottoman lands in the south were traded.