Digging Love in Novgorod's Clay

Should Ukraine and Russia reunite? Valentin Yanin reads the answer in the soil of medieval Novgorod.


There, he has unearthed birchbark documents and ship timbers that show the founders of Novgorod were Baltic Slavs who joined with Ukrainian Slavs to form the first great Russian state. That, says Yanin, proves that "only when the peoples unite is there the possibility of greatness. Maybe, if we stop being fools, that day will come again."


This summer, Yanin, a Moscow University archaeologist who has headed excavations at Novgorod since 1947, touched the roots of another great Russian tradition: the stamp.


The Soviet bureaucrat's love and need for the stamped document had its equivalent in medieval Russia, when seals attested to the authenticity of letters, Yanin said in a recent interview. Few seals were needed until private property -- with its attendant red tape -- was created in the mid-11th century. Yanin's team this summer found a lead seal from the correspondence of Prince Yaroslav the Wise that dates back to that very period. The slightly warped disk is stamped on one side with a boyish St. George with a halo or wreath of curly hair. On the other is a faint portrait of a young man in a helmet, labeled "Yaroslav" in tiny ornate letters.


The find was the most important of the summer. It was the second-oldest seal found in Russia, predated only by one belonging to Yaroslav's uncle Svyatoslav. But Yanin was thrilled because it gave him his first glimpse of Yaroslav in his youth; all other known portraits of the prince show him toward the end of his reign.


"Look what a mustache!" he said, fingering the dull black seal with a certain affection. "In all Russia's long existence, we only had one head of state with the title 'the Wise.' We had the Blessed, the Terrible, you name it, but only one 'Wise.'"


Making historical figures more human is what Yanin likes most about archaeology -- and particularly about Novgorod.


Today a medium-sized city 190 kilometers south of St. Petersburg, Novgorod was built beginning in the ninth century on a thick layer of clay. The clay trapped moisture and kept out air, forestalling the decay of discarded objects and preserving an archaeologist's treasure trove of everyday artifacts made of organic materials like wood, leather and cloth.


The best of all the items unearthed at Novgorod so far are the hundreds of letters written on birchbark -- the paper of the time. They are mainly receipts and business documents, but some, said Yanin, contain details that endow the "abstract figures" of the age with "living tissues." In one, a young lord reminds his mother to "feed the horses."


Yanin's favorite, discovered last year, is a 900-year-old love letter from a woman whose lover apparently failed to show up for a tryst.


The letter is written on two long, narrow strips of mud-stained bark in an old Russian dialect with no discernable spaces between words, but as Yanin reads aloud, a Russian speaker can make out the letters and follow along. "I have sent to you three times this week. Do you hold some kind of evil against me, that you have not visited me once?" writes the unrequited lover, whom Yanin described as well-educated based on the handwriting.


"It seems he crumpled it up and threw it out," said Yanin of the recipient, who he believes was the lord of the estate where the letter was found.


"What is great about this find is that while we always knew ancient Russians were literate, we thought that they all used their letters very pragmatically. Here you have a person writing to express feelings."


"Human beings change very little," he said. "Society may change, but feelings are the same today as they were then: anger, love, hatred."