Not long ago, in an article, I touched on the topic of the confiscation of items of cultural and historical value from the homes and estates of Kharkiv landowners. At the end of that article, I promised that I would definitely write a piece on Kharkiv’s history related to the count’s treasures. Well, a promise is a promise.
By the beginning of the 20th century, the Polish noble family of the Sobanski (or Sobanski) family was quite well known throughout the Russian Empire.
Today, the Soban Barracks on Kanatnaya Street in Odessa serve as a reminder of them; in fact, they were large grain warehouses that belonged to Karolina, the first wife of Odessa’s muse—Pushkin and Mickiewicz.
Beautiful and opulent estates—palaces in the village of Spichyntsi in the Vinnytsia region.
in Verkhovka
in Obodovka
Members of this distinguished and wealthy family were listed in Parts I and VI of the genealogical registers of the Vilna, Vitebsk, Mogilev, and Podolia provinces.
And in 1880, Felix-Hilary-Mikhail Sobanski was granted the title of count by Pope Leo XIII himself.
One of the Sobanskys, Adam—a wealthy sugar manufacturer and landowner—owned an estate in Penkovka (now in the Shargorod District of Vinnytsia Oblast). Unfortunately, it has not survived to this day. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Adam Sobansky left his estate in Penkovka, leaving behind a manager and security guards. He transported his entire rich collection of antiques—inherited from his illustrious ancestors and consisting of paintings, antique tapestries, porcelain, and other items—to our beloved city…
This story began on February 27, 1919, when Fedchun, the head of a sub-district in the 4th District of the Kharkiv City Workers’ and Peasants’ Militia, was dispatched—on the orders of the senior assistant chief of police—to Sumskoy Lane No. 3 to inspect a room filled with various items and furniture and to determine who they belonged to. Such attention to vacant rooms on the part of law enforcement is not at all surprising: after all, there was a housing crisis in our city at that time.
When Fedchun arrived at the scene, he found that the three living rooms were filled with all sorts of baskets, boxes, and trunks. It was impossible to determine exactly how many there were, as the rooms were packed solid all the way to the ceiling. There was also an unknown person in the room who was guarding all these items.
When the guard presented his documents, it turned out that he was Leon Grigoryevich Dmitrovsky, an Austrian subject who had come to Kharkiv from the Penkovka estate in the Podolsk Governorate, where he had served as a valet to Adam Sabansky. During questioning, Leon Dmitrovsky explained that when the war began, Count Adam had packed up his entire collection and sent it to Kharkiv, and then ordered him to follow.
Upon arriving in our city, the loyal servant went to the address indicated by the count in his note: 17 Moskovskaya Street, to Anton Matveyevich Gutovsky, to receive further instructions. Gutovsky sent Dmitrovsky to Dvoryanskaya Street, 1, where the valuables that had already been brought from the estate were being kept. However, in 1917, on Gutovsky’s orders, the entire collection of antiques was moved to a house on Sumskoy Lane.
The guard also pointed out that these items once belonged to the Polish consul Kwiatkowski, but now belong to the National Museum of the City of Kraków and are under the care of a group of Polish communists based at the Polish House.
Dmitrovsky received money for his living expenses from Gutovsky. The former count’s valet could not say anything else.
On March 5, Anton Matveyevich Gutovsky himself was questioned by Senior Assistant Rosentaliev. He turned out to be by no means an ordinary citizen, but a representative of the Society for the Preservation of Polish Historical Monuments. His testimony revealed that in October 1918, Vronsky, a representative of the aforementioned society, had traveled from Kyiv to see him with the aim of sending items to the Kraków Museum.
In the end, they were unable to transport the Sobanskys’ vast collection for a very simple reason. The fact is that our beloved city did not provide the necessary number of cargo spaces in the railcar for this purpose. As he left for Kyiv to resolve the issue of transporting valuables out of Kharkiv, Vronsky instructed Gutovsky to assist the people who would be shipping the items and to take charge of resolving the financial matters.
Because no news had come from Kyiv for a long time, and also due to the temporary closure of the border with Galicia, Gutovsky was forced to continue taking responsibility for the care and safekeeping of the count’s valuables.
Of considerable interest to us is the report by the chief of the Kharkiv Workers’ and Peasants’ Militia, sent on March 11 to the Arts Department of the Provisional Government of Ukraine, which essentially brings this story to a close. While acknowledging that Sobansky’s collection is of immense value, he noted:
Since Poland is currently a bourgeois republic and is at war with Soviet Ukraine, I, for my part, I consider it necessary and appropriate to allocate all these items to the local museum, and to transfer the rest—those not needed by the museum but suitable for household use—to the Council of National Economy, thereby alleviating the housing crisis.
And that is exactly what was successfully accomplished. Alas, I do not know what became of the items deemed “unnecessary for the museum but suitable for everyday use.” As for what remained, it is still preserved to this day at the Kharkiv Art Museum.
So that’s the story about Kharkiv, the count’s treasures, and its cultural heritage.
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