KIEV – The gold of Scythia, other than branded cell phones and televisions. “The Russians have been stealing from our homes with both hands,” the Ukrainians have been saying for weeks, but apparently something even more serious is happening than the systematic door-to-door looting: a series of targeted shots in museums and churches to steal the treasures. and the cultural roots of these lands.
The latest complaint comes from the deposed mayor of Melitopol, Ivan Fedorov, in the South occupied by the invaders. Fedorov, who was kidnapped and released on 11 March after several days in captivity, said on Ukrainian TV that “the ogres – as the Ukrainians call the Russian invaders – have taken over our Scythian gold. It is one of the most popular collections. great and precious in Ukraine, and today we don’t know where they took it, if it was hidden or stolen. We don’t know what its fate is, but this treasure was stolen from our community and I hope we will be able to take it back. “
Fedorov, who is safe in Ukrainian-controlled territory, was not speaking solely on the basis of testimonies received. A video was already circulating in the pro-Russian media in which a special team of occupants found a reliquary, not sufficiently well hidden in a cellar, with the ancient gold collection of the Scythians, the nomadic people of the steppe who between the eighth century BC and until the end of the third after Christ he lived astride an immense territory between the north of the Black Sea and China.
According to New York Times, citing the director of the Melitopol Museum of Local History, Leila Ibrahimova, the museum exhibits 50,000 historical artifacts ranging from old battle axes to Soviet-era medals, but by far the most important collection was that of ancient ornaments of gold of the Scythians. It is to look for that treasure that a group of Russian soldiers would have presented themselves to the museum accompanying a mysterious expert “in a white coat”, who with gloves and due attention found and acquired the timeless jewels of that ancient culture.
“We had hidden everything, but somehow they found it,” Ibrahimova told al Now. Part of the collection had been safely moved to the vault in Kiev before the invasion began, but there was no time for everything else: it had been hidden in cardboard boxes in a cellar. But the Russians, who knew of the existence of that treasure, questioned the keepers and eventually found it. They took away “at least 198 gold items, including flower-shaped ornaments, gold plates, rare old weapons, silver coins and special medals.”
There has already been a real legal battle between the Russians and the Ukrainians over the gold of the Scythians: when Russia decided to annex Crimea, some very precious collections of Scythian treasures in Crimean museums were on loan to Holland. The Ukrainian government appealed not to return them to the Russians, and won the case: they are still in Holland. For the Russians, that ancient culture that united Crimea, part of today’s Ukraine and Russia, is another symbol of what they would like to recreate now, a single empire that is the child of a single culture.
But the gold of the Scythians is not the only treasure stolen in Ukraine by the invaders. Oleksandr Starukh, head of the Zaporizhia regional military administration, says that in March the most precious collections disappeared from the museums of Zaporizhia and from those of other Ukrainian cities. Mariupol city council officials wrote about Telegram that the Russians stole “more than two thousand artifacts” from the museums of the martyr city, including “a unique handwritten scroll of the Torah” and “the Gospel of 1811 made by the Venetian Printing House for the Greeks of Mariupol”.
And there are countless treasures vilified, such as the shooting at the frescoes and the desecration of places of worship perpetrated out of ignorance or outrage by a part of the invaders who profess other religions. But this is a whole other story.