The portrait of the daughter of the last hetman of Ukraine, Pavlo Skoropadsky, may return to Ukraine

The portrait of the daughter of hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi of the century inspired the Ukrainian diaspora in Europe. It was transmitted in the form of postcards, and the original itself was considered forever lost in the maelstrom of the Second World War. Suddenly, the Hetmanship Museum in Kyiv received an unexpected letter from a German family.

Mysterious stranger

In the picturesque town of Oberstdorf, which lies in the middle of the Bavarian Alps in the south of Germany, a family of local farmers has kept an unusual portrait for many years.

It shows a young and beautiful woman wearing a wreath of flowers, a white embroidered dress and a colorful necklace. She looks deeply into the eyes of everyone who looks at the picture. This view seems to hide a difficult but fascinating story.

But which one? Who is this mysterious stranger whose portrait a 15-year-old German boy found 40 years ago.

His daughter Katarina Schall, now an adult woman, says that, like her father, she fell in love with the painting at first sight.

"Colors, flowers, jewelry and a woman's charisma are a kind of magic," she said in an interview with the Ukrainian publication Marie Claire.

Katarina hung the portrait in her apartment. She says that everyone who came to visit paid attention to him and asked who this woman was and what story her image hides.

Then the woman decided to investigate and find out the name of the stranger. At that time, Katarina only knew how the picture got into her family.

In the early 1980s, when Katarina's father was 15 years old, he saw an advertisement in the local newspaper that a house in Oberstdorf was being demolished, the woman told Marie Claire magazine.

The boy collected stamps and hoped to find rare specimens for his collection in the house. Instead, he saw a painting just outside the door.

The woman's portrait impressed him, and he asked the owners what would happen to it. But the owner replied that if the painting is not taken away, it will end up in the trash. So Katarina Schall's father brought the portrait home and hung it in his children's room.

Didn't expect to find

At the same time, the portrait that decorated the house of the Schall family and about which they knew nothing was very famous among the Ukrainian diaspora, historian Oleksandr Alfyorov told BBC Ukraine.

The woman in the portrait is the daughter of the last hetman of Ukraine, Pavel Skoropadskyi, Elizaveta. She was a loyal assistant to her father and an active participant of the Hetman movement, leading the Union of Hetman-Statesmen in the 1960s and 1970s.

The portrait of the Hetmanovna, which was painted by the artist Olga Mordvinova around the 1920s, was well known in the emigration thanks to the postcards that were mass-produced from it. Such a postcard is also in the collection of Alfiorov himself.

According to him, the portrait of Hetmanivna became for the Ukrainian diaspora "the personification of a Ukrainian aristocrat, not even by origin, but an aristocrat of spirit."

However, the fate of the picture itself was unknown. The youngest daughter of Skoropadsky, Olena Pavlivna Ott-Skoropadska, told about its existence and the fact that the picture disappeared when she came to Ukraine, says the historian.

Elizaveta's portrait was not in the family collection of hetman portraits, created by Skoropadsky's friend Olga Mordvinova, which was later transferred to the Hetmanship Museum.

Researchers assumed that the portrait was lost during the Second World War, and did not even hope to find it.

Therefore, when the employees of the Hetmanship Museum received a message from the German Katarina Schall in May 2021, they were very surprised - and happy.

Katarina went to the museum in Kyiv through a Google image search and wrote an email asking who this woman was.

"Since then, the feeling that Hetmanivna is "returning" has not left us," museum researchers say emotionally. "It was her most cherished dream - to live in a free Ukraine."

Dedicated to the independence of Ukraine

Historian Oleksandr Alfyorov is convinced that the portrait found by the Schall family is the original and not one of the copies.

After all, it was found in the city where Elizaveta spent her last years and where she was buried, as well as her father Pavlo Skoropadskyi.

Elizaveta was born in 1899 in St. Petersburg and came to her father's estates in Chernihiv region every summer. She was fascinated by Ukrainian history, primarily the independence movement and the Cossacks, says the Museum of the Hetmanship.

The news about her father's hetmanship became a decisive event in the life of a young romantic girl.

In his memoirs, the hetman mentioned his children and how they experienced the times of the Ukrainian revolution and the beginning of emigration.

As Olena Ott-Skoropadska recounted, Elizaveta "with delight succumbed to the general mood of enthusiasm for the construction of the new Ukrainian Hetman state prevailing in Ukraine at the time." And that is why she took the rebellion against her father and the fall of the Hetmanate so painfully, historians explain.

The Skoropadskyi family had been in exile since 1918 – first in Lausanne in Switzerland, then in 1921-1945 in Wannsee near Berlin.

And after the war, she moved to the town of Oberstdorf in Bavaria, where until her death in 1976, Elizaveta was actively involved in political activities and the development of the hetman movement.

Despite the fact that the Hetman family was very famous in emigration, they did not have huge fortunes and were forced to work, says historian Alfyorov.

In the memories of the family, there are stories about the fact that they were forced to pawn the service and other family valuables almost every month.

"Perhaps in the confusion of events after the death of Elizaveta Skoropadska or during her numerous moves, the portrait was lost or fell into the wrong hands," says the researcher.

The Skoropadskis in emigration were ordinary people, they lived modestly, they did not show off their origin, and therefore the local residents could simply not know what kind of family this was, explains Alfyorov.

The portrait will return

After Katarina Shall wrote to the Museum of the Hetmanship, and the deputy director of the museum Lyudmila Bevz explained to her who was in the portrait, the correspondence ended.

Freelance journalist Mykola Gulko, who was preparing material about the family of Hetman Skoropadskyi, managed to renew negotiations with the Schall family.

He found out in the museum about the amazing find of the portrait, the editors of Marie Claire magazine told BBC Ukraine.

As a result of a long correspondence, the museum and the editors of the magazine agreed on the transfer of the portrait to the Museum of the Hetmanship.

And now the coordination of all the subtleties related to the documents continues, because the portrait is in Germany, and in Ukraine - the war, Marie Claire explained.

The Schall family is proud of the fact that they managed to preserve the historical monument.

"The story of the woman depicted in the portrait is extraordinary. Now, as then, Ukrainians have to go through a lot of suffering. We hope that peace will soon come to Ukraine," they said.

Vyshyvanka Hetmanivna

The elegant white shirt in which Elizaveta Skoropadska is dressed in the portrait is similar to another embroidered shirt created by her, which is kept in the Kyiv museum.

Elizaveta found solace in art. She was a talented sculptor and writer, engaged in embroidery. A shirt in the Museum of the Hetmanship testifies to the creative skill of a young woman.

The exquisite portrait of the girl and her outfit inspired the Ukrainian brand "Ethnodim" to reconstruct Elizaveta's shirt. Motifs of Poltava embroidery from historical archives were used in the ornament.