ZAPOROZHIANS TO THE TURKISH SULTAN
You Turkish Satan, brother and comrade of the damned devil and secretary to Lucifer himself! What the hell kind of knight are you? The devil sh-ts and you and your army swallow it.
You are not fit to have the sons of Christians under you; we are not afraid of your army, and we will fight you on land and on sea. You Babylonian busboy, Macedonian mechanic, Jerusalem beer brewer, Alexandrian goat skinner, swineherd of Upper and Lower Egypt, Armenian pig, Tatar goat, Kamianets hangman, Podolian thief, grandson of the Evil Serpent himself, and buffoon of all this world and the netherworld, fool of our God, swine's snout, mare's asshole, butcher's dog, unbaptized brow, may the devil steam your ass! That's how the Cossacks answer you, you nasty gob of spit! You're unfit to rule Christians. We don't know the date because we don't have a calendar. The moon of the month is in the sky, and the year is in a book, and the day is the same with us as with you. So go kiss our butt!Chief Hetman Zakharchenko with all the Zaporozhian Host14
In his biography of Ivan Sirko, Yavornytsky quotes a very similar letter, perhaps only slightly more insulting, and has it signed by “Otaman Ivan Sirko and the whole Zaporozhian army.”15
Repin was seemingly well acquainted with both versions. Friedman translated the Kostomarov version, thinking that its more archaic language made it older and more original. Like Waugh before him, he also noticed Russian linguistic influences on the Ukrainian text, although, unlike Waugh, he did not suggest that these were due to copying from a Muscovite original, changing the context, and putting it into Ukrainian. Certainly, for Ukrainians, the references in the text to the “hangman of Kamianets” and the “Podolian thief” would have been perfectly clear and would have dated the document fairly precisely, because the great Polish fortress at Ka- mianets-Podolsky (The Place of the Rock), which dominated the Ukrainian province of Podolia, was captured by the Ottomans and the whole of the province annexed to the Ottoman Empire in 1672. That marked the apex of Ottoman power, after which the empire went into a rapid and irreversible decline. The Commonwealth recovered Podolia as early as 1699.16
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- Thic Zaporozhians' Letter: A Controversial History
- the Zaporozhians under TATAR OVERLORDSHIP
- Orthodoxy under Turkish Rule
- In the sultan's service
- Conclusion: Caricatures and Continuing Responses
- the Zaporozhians return to RUSSIAN SOVEREIGNTY
- MAZEPA AND THE ZAPOROZHIANS
- Zaporozhian Defiance; Uprising on the Don