L. V. Perars’ka, the Head of the Department of Medieval Kyiv at the Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine, and Special Research Assistant in the Department of Medieval and Later Antiquities at The British Museum in her work ‘Treasures from Ancient Kyiv in The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Dumbortan Oaks‘ wrote:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a collection of Kievan-Ukrainian treasures of great interest; comparable collections are to be found in only a few European institutions, such as the British Museum, the National Museum of Ukraine, and the Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine in Kyiv, and the Historical Museum and the Armory Museum in Moscow.
The Metropolitan’s holdings contain two different groups of gold and enamel jewelry from the J. Pierpont Morgan collection, and they date from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Both groups were found in Kyiv, one in 1842, the other in 1906. They were found along with other objects and were parts of larger hoards. (Some articles that were part of the 1906 hoard – for instance, the nielloed silver jewelry-entered the British Museum as a gift of J. Pierpont Morgan.)
Those objects in the Metropolitan Museum are known from publications by Ormond M. Dalton, Katharine R. Brown, William D. Wixom, and Patricia S. Griffin.’ However, because the Museum’s collection is geographically separated from the others and because not all the relevant documentation has been discovered, neither of the two original hoards has ever been fully described in an art-historical context.
In this essay, I offer a preliminary description of one group of Morgan pieces, one that belongs to the hoard found in the apse of Desiatynna Church in Kyiv in 1842. Although this hoard was the largest and most valuable of those discovered in that city, there is little published information about it, and its history is still obscure.
The 1842 hoard was significant not only because of its art-historical and metallurgical values but also because of its findspot: the treasure had been hidden in Desiatynna Church, the first [stone] Christian church in Kyiv Rus. The original stone structure had been built over one thousand years earlier by Prince Vladimir [the Great] (979-1015), who named it the Dormition of the Mother of God. This church was meant to replace the main pagan place of worship, the Perun sanctuary on Starokievska Hill, and to mark the successful conversion of Rus to Christianity, as well as its recognition by the Christian world. To commemorate its consecration Prince Vladimir organized a great celebration and announced his wish to donate ten percent of his annual income to the church’s support, hence the unofficial name Desiatynna [Tithes].
It embodied stability and gave the impression that it was sacrosanct. This was probably the reason why most of the known Kyivan treasure-eighteen hoards, found at different times and consisting of different numbers of objects were buried in or near the original Desiatynna Church building. All of the objects were pieces of gold and silver jewelry and were apparently hidden by local residents during a turbulent period.
A tragic fate awaited Desiatynna Church: it did not survive the last fight between the defenders of Kyiv and the Mongol-Tatar invaders who devastated Slav lands and besieged the city in 1240. The siege lasted more than ten weeks, and on December 6, 1240, the church collapsed, burying both the people and the treasures that were hidden there. After the city was taken, a fire broke out and destroyed churches and monasteries (including their books, manuscripts, and art treasures), princely palaces, dwellings, and workshops, as well as other monuments created during the life of the Kyivan state (loth-mid-13th century). Desiatynna Church lay in ruins for over four centuries. Finally, interest in it reemerged, and in 1635 Petro Mohyla, the metropolitan of Kyiv (head of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine), built a wooden structure, which was named Mykolai Desiatynny, on the ruins of the southwestern part of Desiatynna Church.
In the 1820s Alexander Semenovich Annenkov, a wealthy landowner in the Kursk and Orel provinces of Russia, moved to Kyiv. According to a local historian, Nikolai Zakrevski, the sad remains of a decayed and abandoned church standing on the site of the first Christian place of worship in Rus prompted Annenkov to rebuild Desiatynna Church at his own expense. On August 2, 1828, the ancient stone foundations were blessed, inaugurating the construction of a new church of the Dormition of the Mother of God. Annenkov not only provided financial support for building a new stone church, but he also became a supervisor of the construction and purchased a mansion nearby and the land under it; thus, one can only speculate that he expected to uncover artifacts in this historic place. He tried to prevent any official archaeological excavations on his new property and appealed to D. G. Bibikov, the governor-general of Kyiv, arguing that he had personally conducted searches on the property and had not found anything other than some stones and a bell.
After fourteen years the building was finally completed. The new stone church was slightly smaller than its predecessor, and the altar area of the original stone structure remained standing outside the walls of the new building. Just a few days before its dedication, when some final landscaping was being carried out, a small cavity was discovered in the apse of the original Desiatynna Church. In the cavity, workers unexpectedly found a huge treasure from the period of the Great Princes (l0th-mid-13th century). It was made up of gold and cloisonne jewelry and gold plate. According to one of Annenkov’s servants, the find was not looted by the workers on site, as often happened with similar finds, because Annenkov had carefully placed the objects in two large sacks, which he hid in his mansion. He did not report the remarkable find to the Committee for the Research of Antiquities in Kyiv, although he was one of its members…
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