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Grand Princess Yelena Glinskaya

Дата публикации: 08 сентября 2018
Автор(ы): Sergei NIKITIN; Tatyana PANOVA
Публикатор: Шамолдин Алексей Аркадьевич
Рубрика: RUSSIA (TOPICS)
Номер публикации: №1536414768


Sergei NIKITIN; Tatyana PANOVA, (c)

By Sergei NIKITIN, criminologist, Moscow Office of Forensic Medicine; and Tatyana PANOVA, Cand. Sc. (History), head of the Archeology Department, Moscow Kremlin Museum

The Moscow Kremlin museums are in custody of a unique gallery of sculptural portraits of Russian czars and grand princesses of the sixteenth century. This portraiture was reproduced in our time and age, in the 1960s and 1990s.

Our readers have already met Sophia Palaeologus (Palaeo-logos(*)), the second wife of Grand Prince Ivan III and the grandmother of Ivan the Terrible, the first Russian czar. Our readers have also learned something about the fate of Yelena (Helen) Glinskaya(**), the mother of Ivan the Terrible: that young woman, embroiled in Kremlin infighting, was poisoned. Although it makes no sense to go over that story again, it would be worthwhile nonetheless to supply more lowdown...

So: Grand Princess Yelena Glinskaya, the widow of Grand Prince Vassily III, expired in the small hours of Wednesday, April 3, 1538, leaving two little orphans, the sons Ivan and Yuri. And who knows, the Russian history of the latter half of the sixteenth century might not have been as tragic and gory as it actually was had Ivan the Terrible (Ivan IV) been in for a more fortunate destiny in his childhood. Yet ill stars looked down on him. As was the custom of the day, the Muscovites learned about Yelena Glinskaya's demise from the tolling of the bells. The news of the sudden death of the thirty-year-old woman spread apace and overwhelmed everybody. There was quite a bit of rumor and hearsay. And yet the rumours that the regent princess had been poisoned proved to be true in the end. More than that, investigations carried out late in the 20th century confirmed the worst. It was not by chance that Yelena figured in the NOTES penned by one of her contemporaries, the Austrian diplomat Sigismund Herberstein. Accusing the grand princess of the death of her uncle, Mikhail Lvovich, in gaol, Herr Herberstein observed that Yelena Glinskaya herself "perished from poison... shortly afterwards".

The next day her body was laid to rest in the Kremlin's Ascension Cathedral, in a necropolis set aside for grand princesses. Yelena Glinskaya's grave was located in the southwestern part of the church. For centuries, up until the year 1929, no one dared disturb the mortal remains of Muscovian grand princesses. But that year, by the Soviet government's decision, the Ascension Cathedral (the main church of nunnery bearing the same name) was pulled down to clear the site for the construction of a military school of the chief executive office VTsIK. However, the staff of the Kremlin museum managed to save the stone sarcophagi with the ashes of Russian grand princesses and czarinas and move them to the Archangel Cathedral where, after a time, they were put to rest in the


* See: S. Nikitin and T. Panova, "Sophia Palaeologus and the Greek Profile of Ivan the Terrible", Science in Russia, No. 1, 1998. -Ed.

** See: T. Makarenko and T. Panova, "The Poison All High Life Pervades", Science in Russia, No. 2, 2000. -Ed.

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basement's chamber. This burial vault is still there. One of the tombs is that of Yelena Glinskaya. It has an original design in the form of a human figure with prominent head and shoulders, cut from a solid block of white limestone brought in from a quarry near Moscow. The coffin proper is 1.96 cm long and 36 cm high (counting in the lid, 49.5 cm). A 3 cm stone pillow was built for the head, and a 4x3 cm aperture was made on one of the sides of the coffin, next to the feet. A heavy lid cut from a solid white stone carries this epitaph: "In the year 1538, on the 3rd day of April, Wednesday, the fifth day of Lent, at 2 hours, the Grand Princess Yelena, of the Grand Prince of all Russia Vassily Ivanovich, passed away."

At this point it would be in place to describe the burial ceremonies of the day-how the deceased princes and princesses were seen off on their last journey to the grave. It would be wrong to think their bodies were laid out in huge stone coffins and thus carried to the church for the memorial service. No! The body of a late lamented was borne out in a wooden coffin, with the lid carried apart. Then the coffin was placed on a slay, regardless of the season, and thus carried to the burial vault. Here's a testimony made by the Kievan prince Vladimir Monomach (1053-1125) in his Instructions at the close of his days. Addressing his children, the prince spoke of "sitting on the slay", which means a journey to the grave-"going west". That old pagan rite of translating the mortal remains in a slay persisted for centuries, and it was abolished only in the early 18th century under Czar Peter I. And yet the ritual survived in the backwoods of Russia up until the middle of the 20th century.

But back to Grand Princess Yelena Glinskaya. Accompanied by priests, relatives and court nobles, her coffin was carried in a slay to the Ascension Cathedral where the burial service was officiated. The grave with a white-stone sarcophagus in it was ready to receive Yelena Glinskaya's clay which, after the liturgy, was taken out of the wooden coffin and placed into the stone one. Just before that, the body was wrapped up in a shroud of Italian silk fabric (damask). A blue hem decorated this yellow cerement. Found on the skull were patches of a bonnet clipped to the hair with two copper pins. Yelena's hair was red, and so was Ivan's which fact was recorded by contemporaries. But what did that woman look like in the flesh-a woman for whose sake Grand Prince Vassily III even sacrificed his beard, scoffing at the customs and traditions of his age?

It's both a thrilling and responsible job to reconstruct the portraiture of personages who lived in the dim and distant past, and left a trace in our history. Even though the techniques of reproducing the real image of a person from his or her remains have been tested with much success by one of the authors of this article for thirty years, and the reliability of these methods has been confirmed by documental evidence in hundreds of forensic expert examinations, there is always

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room for queries and doubts, for every new work poses unexpected problems and difficulties. The reconstruction of Yelena Glinskaya's image was just that case. The point is the occipital part of her cranium was ravaged by decay. To reconstruct the skull as it originally was, our people used plasticine. In this way they could incarnate the facial features of the grand princess. To restore the occiput of Yelena's head, our experts even studied the shape of the back of the head of her older son, Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible); for comparison they took the czar's sculptural portrait made in 1963 by the Russian anthropologist Mikhail Gerassimov.(*)

It was quite a problem to identify the position of the eyeballs in the sockets, but it was likewise solved in the end. What a pity that the color of Yelena's eyes will always remain an enigma!

The grand princess must have had a charming smile, judging by her excellent teeth, sweet and beautiful. The Baltic type of her features came from the Polish-Lithuanian descent of the Glinsky family. Yet her older son, Ivan the Terrible, inherited but little from his mother-here the Greek blood of the Paleologi in his father's line proved stronger (Ivan's father was Grand Prince Vassily III).

You can't call Yelena Glinskaya a flaming beauty. But her face was nice and gentle, quite unlike her son's:

Ivan IV was notorious for his quick temper and cruelty. Yelena's hair style was modelled arbitrarily, of course; we see her hair covered in part with a headpiece, which was just a round cap with a narrow brow tape. Shreds of this headdress were found in the sarcophagus. Conserved, they add to the collection of medieval apparel in the stock of the Moscow Kremlin museums.


* See: M. Gerassimov and H. Medvedev, "Reincarnating Images of the Past", Science in Russia, No. 5, 1998.-Ed.

Опубликовано на Порталусе 08 сентября 2018 года

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