By digging under the foundations of the city of Iaroslavl, west of Russia, archaeologists have discovered a real necropolis. Targeted by the Mongolian armies of Batu Khan, grandson of Gengis Khan in 1238, we did not really know the magnitude of the massacre which had taken place there. The last archaeological excavations have just delivered freezing lighting on the abuses committed by the descendant of the founder of the Mongolian Empire.
According to the online media All that is interesting, more than 300 bodies have been exhumed in nine common pits, proofs of a massacre of rare brutality. Among these human remains, a discovery particularly marked archaeologists: that of three generations of the same family buried side by side. The oldest woman was at least 55, her daughter between 30 and 40 years old, and a young boy, probably her grandson, was under 20 years old.
“These people were killed and their bodies were lying in the snow for a fairly long period of time”explains Asya Engovatova, deputy director of the Archeology Institute of the Academy of Sciences of Russia and Cheffe of excavations on the site of Iaroslavl. It was not until the spring, after several weeks of exposure to the open air, that their bodies would have been buried in one of the pits located on land that could be their property.
The bones found were broken, burned or pierced, testifying to the extreme violence of the killing of the victims, who were apparently not simple peasants. The analysis of the teeth of certain bodies found suggests that they had access to rare products for the time, such as honey or sugar, testifying to a certain social status. A material comfort that has not weighed a lot in the face of the brutality of the Mongolian troops.
A national tragedy
Batu Khan’s offensive on Russia did not stop there. In five years, he would have wiped out 7% of the country’s population, attacking more than a dozen cities. When the Grand Russian prince refused to submit, Khan featured the capital with, in its walls, the whole royal family and its inhabitants.
For Asya ENGOVATOVA, this conquest remains “The largest national tragedy, surpassing any other event in cruelty and destruction”. It is no coincidence that it has crossed the centuries up to Russian folklore, she insists, despite the little information that researchers have on the progress of the massacres.
The researcher also qualifies Iaroslavl as “City drowned in the blood”. The extreme violence of the abuses committed methodically by the Mongolian troops seems however to have been buried in centuries of forgetting, as if the story had wanted to erase the traces of this carnage.
However, as archaeologists exhly bodies, it is a whole collective memory that reappears. The presence of this grandmother, her daughter and her grandson, buried together, does not only say the tragedy of a family, but symbolizes the brutal annihilation of an entire city.
