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1625 into a Cossack family of Poltava. Her father, Hordii Churai was an adviser to Pavliuk, the leader of the Cos sack insurrection against the Poles in 1637. After the suppresion of the uprising, Marusia’s father was carried off to Warsaw where the Poles executed him. Marusia and her mother were left to fend for themselves. The young girl’s good looks and attractive voice soon brought her many admirers and an officer of the Poltava regi ment named Hryhoriy Bobrenko fell in love with her. But Hryhoriy betrayed his beautiful girl and in revenge she poisoned him. For this act the judiciary of the Pol tava regiment condemned her to death (1652). On the day of her execution, however, which was supposed to be carried out in the town square in Pol tava, just as a herald was reading out the sentence before the assembled crowds, a messenger arrived from Hetman Bohdan Khmelntysky bearing a letter of cle mency. She had been granted her life in memory of the heroic deeds of her father and in honor of her own com positions. Marusia did not live long, however, for by the end of the following year, 1653, she had died of grief. The tragic figure of the Ukrainian Sappho was never forgotten and she remained the subject of story and song for many years to come. Many Ukrainian writers depicted her in their works. These included Mykhailo Starytsky and Olha Kobylianska before the revolution and others after. Perhaps the best-known modern work dealing with Marusia Churai is the much admired histor ical novel in verse composed by Lina Kostenko. The image of Marusia Churai drawn in these works is always a positive one but in fact we know very little about her concrete traits and actual physical appearance. “History has not bequeathed us a depiction of Marusia Churai,” writes the Cossack historian Storozhenko, “but this is of no consequence, because her features are more or less reflected in every Cossack woman. It is not surprising, as well, that folk artists have always depicted Marusia Churai in accord with their imagination and with the faces of local girls.” There is one last theme that we must consider before concluding our sketch of Cossack women, and this is the theme of Tatar captivity. In their raids on the Ukrainian lands it was the practice of the Tatar invaders to capture and carry off large numbers of young men and women to be sold in the slave markets of kafa and other Crimean towns whence they would be transported to Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, to be resold. The men would generally end up as oarsmen in the Turkish galleys while the girls and women would enter the harems of wealthy Turks and Arabs. Almost every year, it is said, thousands of such captives were taken from the various Ukrainian lands; Ukrainian folk song bewailed their harsh fate. Modern historians, how ever, tell us that this slave trade was not as extensive as once thought and that, although the process of capture and transport to Istanbul was difficult and dangerous, once a Ukrainian slave-girl finally entered a household in the Middle East, she was generally well treated and both she and her children became an integral part of the Islamic polygamous family. In fact, many famous Tur kish public figures, including members of the imperial dynasty itself were the children of such Ukrainian slave girls. A few examples may suffice. Sultan Suleyman I (1520-1566), Sultan Osman II (1618-1622), Ibrahim (1640-1648), and Mustafa II (1695-1703) all had Ukrain ian “wives”. The mothers of Mohammed IV (1648-1687) and Osman III (1754-1757) were both Ukrainian. Ukrain ian slave girls found their way into harems as far away as Syria and Egypt. There they quickly became accus tomed to their new way of life and many of them con verted to Islam. Some, however, never completely forgot about the religion and land of their birth. A famous Ukrainian historical song or d u m a tells of a Cossack girl, Marusia Bohuslavka, who was married to a rich Turk and secretly freed his Cossack slaves so that they might return to their native land; she herself, however, had “turned Turk” and became a Moslem. But by far the most famous of these Ukrainian slave girls was the favorite and wife of Suleyman the Magnifi cent (1520-1566), greatest of the Turkish sultans under whom the Ottoman Empire reached the peak of its power and prestige. Suleyman remained well-beloved by the Turks and is known to them as k a n u n i or “the law-giver”. As to his Ukrainian born wife, her original name was Nastia Lisovska and she was the daughter of a priest from the town of Rohatyn in Western Ukraine. She had been captured by the Tatars in 1523 when she was about twenty-two years of age and because of her grace, talents, and intelligence soon found herself in the Sultan’s harem. There she became known on the one hand among outside by the name of Roxolana (after her home in Ruthenia or Rus’), and by the name of “Khur- rem”, “the laughing one” among the intimates of the harem. She was not paticularly beautiful but she had a slight, graceful figure, great charm, and a sense of gaity that soon enabled her to gain the complete affections of the sultan. A Bellini portrait of her shows a striking pro file with red hair hanging down her back in two braids. Around her neck are several rows of huge pearls. Suley man immediately fell in love with her and within a year she presented him with a son (the first of her five children). But Roxolana also had a dark side to her character. She was extremely jealous and very ambitious and immediately began scheming against Suleyman’s senior consort, Gulbehar (“Flower of Spring”), and her son, the heir apparent, Mustafa, as well as against the powerful Grand Vizier, Ibrahim. Roxolana was able to outmaneu- ver both Ibrahim and Mustafa and managed to get both of them executed. Eventually, Roxolana’s own son, Selim, succeeded to the throne. 20 НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, БЕРЕЗЕНЬ 1995 Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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