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Most peoples have had, at certain stages in their development, a penchant for collecting the heads of their enemies. The ancient Celts did it, the Scythians did it, even in Medieval Europe it was quite widespread, while Samurai warriors presented severed heads to their lords as proof of their valour. It appears that in Russia, though, old habits die hard.
Recently a Moscow court rejected a rather unusual claim from a Dagestani resident. The man wanted the St. Petersburg Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, also known as the Kunstkamera, to return the skull of his ancestor – famous Caucasian warlord Haji-Murat Gajiyev who fought the Russians together with the legendary Imam Shamil in the mid-19th century, and perished way back in 1852.
Russian soldiers presented Haji-Murat’s head to the Tsar’s governor in the region and he, in turn, sent it to St. Petersburg, where the skull was kept first in the Military-Medical Academy and then in the Kunstkamera, along with other numerous curiosities. The chieftain’s headless body, meanwhile, was buried in his homeland in accordance with local traditions.
Years had passed, when, in 1999 Dagestan marked Imam Shamil’s bicentennial and the residents of Haji-Murat’s home region decided to bury their hero’s skull together with his body. One of Haji-Murad Gajiyev’s kinsmen was ordered to arrange everything.
The man sent an official letter to the Russian Ministry of Culture and ministry officials ordered the skull removed from the museum’s fund. The museum did this, but still refused to hand over the Tsar’s trophy because they claimed a special order was needed. After three years of hearings the court eventually decided that the skull is Federal property and therefore cannot be handed over to a private individual. The court also found that Gajiyev’s kinsmen had failed to prove their relation to the warlord.
To learn more about Haji-Murat we can recommend the imaginatively-titled ‘Haji-Murat’ by Leo Tolstoy.
Gazeta.Ru
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