On December 4, Russian archaeologist Aleksandr Butyagin sat unsuspecting in his hotel in Warsaw. He was doing a short series of lectures on ‘The Last Day of Pompeii’. After Prague, Amsterdam and Warsaw, Belgrade was still waiting. And then suddenly he was arrested by the Polish police and became part of an international riot with the Russian occupation of Crimea and Russia’s war against Ukraine in the background.
Butyagin is suspected by Ukraine of having carried out illegal excavations in Crimea. Russia may have annexed Crimea in 2014, but the peninsula is and remains Ukrainian territory for Ukraine and a large part of the international world, where Ukrainian laws still apply. Excavation is therefore only allowed with a Ukrainian permit.
Absurd, was the response from the Russian Foreign Ministry. Because how can a respected Russian archaeologist be accused of ‘destruction of cultural heritage’ on Russian territory?
It is possible that Butyagin, born in Saint Petersburg in 1971, is also not aware of any wrongdoing. He heads the archaeological department of the Hermitage and has led the excavations of Myrmekion, the Greek colony founded in the sixth century BC near what is now the modern city of Kerch, since 1999. The first excavations of the city were already in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, archaeologists from the Soviet Union’s Academy of Sciences excavated for two long periods. After the independence of Ukraine in 1991, it was no problem that these continued for a short time and that the Hermitage started a new excavation project in 1999 under the leadership of Butyagin.
At that time, Buttyagin was ‘normally’ part of the international archaeological community. He attended conferences, conducted research with Italians in Stabiae near Pompeii and published regularly.
Coin hoard from the time of Alexander the Great
After Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Butyagin continued the excavations of Myrmekion. He neatly publishes what he has excavated in English, but in a Russian journal. In 2022, he announced via Russian media that he had found a coin hoard from the time of Alexander the Great. These would go to a new museum to be built in Crimea.
Russian researcher Vladimir Tikhonov from the University of Oslo knows ‘Sacha’ Butyagin from the past, he says on his Facebook page. He was his childhood friend with whom he attended the Archaeological Club of Saint Petersburg between 1986 and 1989. He further explains that Butyagin worked with Ukrainian archaeologists for years during the excavations of Myrmekion.
Yet he says Buttyagin violated Ukrainian laws after 2014 by continuing to dig. On the other hand, he wonders what his childhood friend as an employee of a Russian state museum should have done differently. If he had protested he might have been fired, arrested and forced into exile. Tikhonov is happy that he did not have to make this choice himself.
Last year, Ukraine officially accused Butyagin of illegal excavation and damage to a monumental archaeological site. This was no reason for Butyagin to refrain from giving lectures, in Russian, in Amsterdam, among others, where he was a guest at Localie Hub on IJburg. His visit to Amsterdam raises the question why he was arrested in Poland, but not in the Netherlands.
Under Polish law, Ukraine has 40 days to request Buttyagin’s extradition.
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