IVAN SIRKO

IVAN DMYTROVYCH SIRKO
(1605 - 04.05.1680)

Ivan Dmytrovych Sirko (1610-1680) - the basket chieftain of Zaporozhye Sich.
During his tenure, the chieftain fought many large and small battles, while never being defeated.
Ivan Sirko - a man of excellent military talents. Turks called him Urus-shaitan, that is, "Russian devil", and Turken mothers used to scare their children with his name.
Ivan Sirko always stood for the Orthodox faith. "Do not be afraid that I am not Orthodox: I am an Orthodox Christian!" Ivan Sirko told people who thought he was a sorcerer. He is often mentioned as a characteristic Cossack.

There are many legends associated with the name of the legendary basket captain Ivan Sirk. Like, when he was born, he immediately stood up and began to bite the cake that was lying on the table. Sulfur was "not taken" by either a bullet or a sword.

Probably, none of the Ukrainian hetmans and chieftains did as much damage to the Crimean Tatar and Turkish hordes as Ivan Sirko, the Turks sent hired killers to him, but the attempts were revealed.

One of his most famous victories is "Christmas Massacre" 1675 year. That winter, the Turkish sultan planned to completely destroy Zaporizhia Sich. An army of more than 50,000, including 15,000 selected Turkish janissaries, secretly approached Sichi on Christmas night, but a miracle happened, as a result of which almost all the janissaries were killed by the Cossacks, and the Tatars barely escaped.

Sirko was the Cossack chieftain of the Zaporizhia, in that cruel and terrible time, when Right-Bank and Left-Bank Ukraine were torn apart by mutual passions, intensified by the intervention of neighbors - Poland, Muscovy, Turkey and Crimea under its control. In this boiling of passions, both contemporaries and historians note Sirk's absolute impermanence, his momentary emotional outbursts.

He establishes close contacts with the head of the Cossack-peasant uprising in Russia, Razin, whom he knew well from the 1648-54 war in Ukraine, when he commanded the Don Cossack regiment in Khmelnitsky's army.

This behavior of Sirko made him an enemy of Moscow, and when in April 1672 he appeared in the Hetman region with a small bodyguard, after another denunciation, Sirko was arrested by the left-bank Hetman Ivan Samoilovich and sent to Moscow and then exiled to Siberia - to Tobilsk. The Zaporozhians immediately sent an embassy to the Russian Tsar Oleksiy Romanov demanding Sirk's return. The Poles also asked to release Sirk and give him the opportunity to participate in military operations against the Muslims, since without Sirk Poland began to regularly succumb to devastating Tatar raids. In addition to this, another invasion of the Turks with a horde was expected in Russia itself - and as a result, already at the beginning of 1673, Ivan Sirk was returned from exile in Zaporozhye.

Ivan Sirko was very unstable in his political attitudes, but the only constant item in Sirko's "program" was defense of the Orthodox faith . And in this point, he sometimes reached extreme cruelty.

Sparkling Ilya Repin's painting "Zaporozhians write a letter to the Turkish sultan" conveys an episode from Sirk's life, composing a reply to the sultan shortly after the same "Christmas Massacre" , when the Zaporozhians destroyed selected units of janissaries.


However, in reality, the matter was not limited to one letter. The background of the glorious message is as follows. In the summer of 1676 the Zaporozhians invaded the Crimea and, in response to the winter attack, made another devastation of the peninsula. Among the rich booty, as usual, there were freed prisoners, about 7 thousand people. After leaving the Crimea, Sirko addressed the former prisoners with a speech in which he invited people to decide their own fate. As a result, about three thousand people decided to return to Crimea, where they had time to have families and found their new homeland. Sirko let them go and, waiting for them to move away from the camp, sent young Cossacks with the order: "to destroy all of them." A little later, he went himself to make sure that the order was carried out.

From the point of view of modern society, this event can be called direct genocide. Sirko, on the other hand, acted quite logically, realizing that the children of those who voluntarily renounced the Orthodox faith could soon join the ranks of the same janissaries.

But this stern warrior, whom the Turks and Tatars called the "Seven-headed Dragon" and the "Urus-shaitan", who lost two sons in battles for the Orthodox faith, was a generous and sensitive person. When the bubonic plague was raging in the Crimea, he allowed the Tatars to move to Zaporozhian lands not infected by the epidemic, and to the opponents of such a decision he succinctly replied: "We will be people."

The old ataman died in August 1680 at his own apiary in the village of Hrushivka. His body was brought to Zaporozhye and buried with all honors, but he did not have to rest in eternal peace.

The coffin with Sirk's body was kept in Zaporizhzhia for five years, and it was constantly taken on military campaigns, since Ivan Sirk was considered Sich's guardian against military failures even after his death. Then, the body was still given to the ground, but before that, according to the will of chief Sirk himself, the right hand, which continued to be present in military campaigns, was cut off. Going into battle, the Cossacks put his hand forward: "Sirka's soul and hand are with us!", and it terrified all the enemies.

Another legend says that the chieftain's hand helped defeat the French in 1812. Cossack Mykhailo Nelipa, whose family looked after Sirko's grave, told Kutuzov himself about his will - and he sent for the victorious hand. Sirk's hand delivered to Moscow was encircled three times around the city occupied by the enemy - the result is known...
The hand of the basket was buried only after the destruction of Sichi.

After Mazepa's "betrayal", Peter I, enraged, ordered to wipe Sich off the face of the earth, including the Cossack graves. The same thing happened during the final liquidation of Sich by order of Catherine II. In both cases, the graves of Sirk were also desecrated, but local residents each time preserved the remains of the legendary chieftain and reburied them in the ground.

The Soviet authorities took up the matter more radically. As a result of the construction of the Dniproges and the creation of the Kakhovsky Reservoir, the so-called Velikiy Lug was destroyed - huge land massifs, the heart of the Cossack region was covered by water. Sirko's grave was located right on the steep bank of the man-made "sea" and in 1968, under the pretext of saving the "monument of antiquity", Ivan Sirko's remains were exhumed. The skeleton, after a long delay, was reburied in the village of Kapulivka, and Sirk's skull was brought to Moscow, to the workshop of the famous academician Gerasimov, who was engaged in the reconstruction of portraits of historical figures based on their skulls and skeletal remains.
The academician did his job, and Sirk's headless body continued to lie on the banks of the Chortomlyk River, since no one thought to return the hero chieftain's skull to its designated place.

In August 2000, at the turn of the millennium, Sulfur's ashes were reunited with the skull. Specialists from Dnipropetrovsk University conducted a unique burial, for which they had to make an excavation under the hill where the monument to the hero is erected and under which the remains of the Zaporozhian chieftain rested, concreted from above.

Distant descendants of the Zaporozhians finally performed a Christian act in relation to zealot and defender of Orthodoxy - Ivan Sirko

material: A. Marin (Kornev), A. Serba
prepared by: Anton Voloshyn