Black Grave

The Black Grave (Chorna Mohyla) is a large 10th-century Varangian burial mound in Boldina Hora park — the largest surviving kurgan (burial mound) in Ukraine, rising about 11 metres above the surrounding ground. The mound was excavated in 1872 by the archaeologist Samiilo Samokvassov and yielded one of the richest Viking-era burial assemblages ever found in Eastern Europe.

Today the mound itself remains — an unassuming grassy hill in a park — but the grave goods are distributed between several museums, with the finest pieces in the National History Museum in Kyiv. A smaller local display can be seen in the Chernihiv History Museum on Val Hill. The setting of the mound, in a park that also contains several smaller kurgans nearby, gives a surprisingly vivid sense of the pre-Christian funerary landscape of medieval Chernihiv — a city that was as much Viking as Slavic in its 10th-century character.

things to do sight museum
A story
When archaeologists opened the Black Grave in 1872, they found inside it the cremated remains of a warrior of extraordinary status — buried with his horse, a slave boy, weapons decorated with gold, drinking horns tipped with silver, and two large Byzantine amphoras. The burial included ritual hunting gear: a bone pipe used to summon hawks. Among the grave goods were also Byzantine and Eastern objects that showed the reach of the 10th-century Chernihiv elite's trade networks. The identity of the buried warrior has never been established, but the grave goods suggest a Varangian (Norse) prince or commander of the highest rank.