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Culture region, Ukraine

Khortytsia

The Dnieper island of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, whose shaved heads and long forelock, the oseledets, are a symbol of Ukraine.

Khortytsia, the largest island on the Dnieper river, at the city of Zaporizhzhia, was linked with the Zaporozhian Cossacks, the free warrior communities of the 16th to 18th centuries whose fortress, the Sich, stood on and near it. The Cossacks shaved their heads but left one long lock of hair on top, the oseledets, often hooked over the ear. The style is still a symbol of Ukrainian history and defiance.

The oseledets

Oseledets means herring in Ukrainian, after the lock's long, thin shape; it was also called chupryna. The lock could be long enough to wind behind the ear. Paintings such as Ilya Repin's Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, finished in 1891, show the style. It has roots in older steppe customs: the Byzantine historian Leo the Deacon described Sviatoslav, a 10th-century ruler of Kyiv, with a shaved head and a single lock on one side.

The Cossack legacy

The Zaporozhian Sich was destroyed by the Russian empire in 1775, but the image of the Cossack with his oseledets lived on in Ukrainian art, literature and song, and in the dance hopak. A museum of Zaporozhian Cossack history stands on Khortytsia. Since 2014, and especially since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many Ukrainian soldiers have worn the oseledets as a mark of identity.

Hairstyles of Khortytsia

OseledetsThe forelock of the Zaporozhian CossacksCzuprynaThe related Polish and Ukrainian forelock style

Photo credits on this page

The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.

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