The Girl Who Freed 700 Cossacks: the Epic Songs Called Dumy

In a stone dungeon on the shore of the Black Sea, 700 Cossacks have been held captive for 30 years. A girl, herself brought to Turkey as a captive, comes to visit and asks: “In the Christian lands, what day is it today?” So begins one of Ukraine’s epic songs called “duma” (дума, plural думи, dumy) — “Marusia Bohuslavka.”

Dumy are songs performed by traveling singers called kobzari, accompanied by instruments such as the bandura. The instrument and its singers are covered in “The Traveling Blind Bards Called Kobzari, and Their Instrument, the Bandura.” This article reads the texts of the songs themselves, drawing on the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (IEU), published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS); the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine (ESU), published by the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and others; and the folklorist Filaret Kolessa’s edited text Ukrainski Narodni Dumy (Ukrainian Folk Dumy, Lviv, 1920), as of September 2026.

A Long Recitation Without a Fixed Verse Form

According to IEU’s entry “Duma,” the dumy are epic and lyric works of folk origin, taking as their subject events of the Cossack era of the 16th and 17th centuries. They have no fixed stanza form, and are built of irregular units of varying length that follow the movement of the story; a single line can run anywhere from 4 to 40 syllables. The same entry explains that each unit forms a complete statement of a single thought.

The rhyme is distinctive too. IEU writes that, typically, verbs rhyme, binding several lines together as a unit. ESU’s entry “Duma” (written by Sofiia Hrytsa) describes a single duma as a large work of roughly 200 to 300 lines, whose units were called “ustupy” (уступи) among the singers themselves.

There are set patterns of phrasing too. According to ESU, the opening has a fixed introduction called a “zaplachka” (заплачка), which often uses a comparison built on negation, such as “It is not a bright falcon crying out — it is a son sending word to his father and mother.” The ending closes with a fixed formula of prayer and blessing, such as “God, free us from heavy captivity.” Doubling words of similar meaning, as in “weeping, sobbing” (плаче-ридає), is another feature both IEU and ESU note.

What Was Sung

IEU divides the dumy into two cycles. The older cycle sings of battles with the Tatars and Turks; the newer cycle sings of battles with Poland, especially in the era of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. ESU states that around 40 plots and more than 300 variants are known.

Marusia Bohuslavka — the Girl Who Freed the Captive Cossacks

Filaret Kolessa’s edited Ukrainski Narodni Dumy (Ukrainian Folk Dumy, Lviv, 1920) prints this duma on pages 73–74. It is a variant recorded from a blind singer in a village of Bohodukhiv county, Kharkiv Governorate, and printed in the 19th-century writer Panteleimon Kulish’s Zapiski o Yuzhnoi Rusi (Notes on Southern Rus).

Що на Чорному морі, / На камені біленькому, / … / Що у тій то темниці пробувало сімсот козаків, / Бідних невольників.

Filaret Kolessa, ed., Ukrainski Narodni Dumy (Ukrainian Folk Dumy, Lviv, 1920), p. 73 (opening excerpt)

The opening reads: “On the Black Sea, on a white stone [there was a stone dungeon], and in that dungeon there were 700 Cossacks, poor captives.” What follows summarizes the plot from the same page.

• Marusia, a captive girl (the daughter of a priest from Bohuslav), comes to the dungeon and asks what day it is today. The Cossacks, who have not seen daylight in 30 years, say they do not know
• When the girl tells them, “Today is the Saturday before Easter, tomorrow is Easter,” the Cossacks fall to the ground and curse the girl who told them the date of the feast
• The girl promises that when her Turkish master leaves for the mosque, he entrusts the keys to her, and she will open the dungeon then
• On Easter Day, the girl opens the dungeon and lets the Cossacks escape, asking them to tell her parents in Bohuslav: “Do not sell your property for a ransom — I have already become a person of Turkey”

According to Kolessa’s notes, “Bohuslavka” means “from the town of Bohuslav,” on the Ros River. IEU’s entry “Marusia Bohuslavka” writes that there is no evidence this girl actually existed, and that she is likely a composite figure drawn from slave girls who, in one way or another, helped captive Cossacks. Kolessa himself, in his commentary, writes that the line “had not seen daylight for 30 years” should be read as poetic exaggeration.

The Black Sea Storm and Oleksii Popovych

Pages 92–95 of the same book contain “Oleksii Popovych.” It opens with a scene of a storm on the Black Sea, and is also known by the name “The Storm on the Black Sea.”

Ой, по Чорному морю, / Ой, на каміні біленькому, / Там сидів сокіл ясненький, / Жалібненько квилить-проквиляє

Filaret Kolessa, ed., Ukrainski Narodni Dumy (Ukrainian Folk Dumy, Lviv, 1920), p. 92 (opening four lines)

Here too it opens “on the Black Sea, on a white stone.” A falcon on the stone cries mournfully, the sea grows rough, and the Cossacks’ boat is broken into three. One is swept toward Turkish land, another to the mouth of the Danube, and the remaining one begins to sink. The leader of this boat’s company calls on the men to confess their sins to God, the Black Sea, and the Cossack commander.

While all stay silent, the one who steps forward is the clerk Oleksii Popovych, who reads scripture three times a day and has taught it to the others. He asks to be tied to a stone and sunk in the sea, and when the Cossacks ask why his sin is greatest, he confesses: that he went to war without his parents’ blessing, that he neglected his brother and sister, that he trampled the children of a town with his horse, and that he passed before a church without removing his hat. Once he confesses, the storm calms, and the Cossacks are washed ashore on Tendra Island without losing a single man. Oleksii teaches that “a father’s and mother’s prayers can save a person even from the bottom of the sea,” and the song ends with words of blessing.

According to Kolessa’s notes, this variant is based on a recording from the singer Hnat Honcharenko. The song’s geography is confined to the northwest of the Black Sea, from the mouth of the Dnipro to the mouth of the Danube, and Kolessa introduces the view of the 19th-century researchers Antonovych and Drahomanov that the song was composed in the era when Cossacks began raiding the Black Sea by boat — that is, the end of the 16th century.

How Far Back Do the Records Go?

The two encyclopedias both cite the oldest record mentioning dumy as the Chronicle of the Polish chronicler Stanisław Sarnicki. According to ESU, this book was published in Kraków in 1587, and IEU writes that it contains, under the year 1506, a passage describing how a sad song, a duma, was composed to mourn two brothers who died in a campaign against Wallachia.

As for the oldest example of the text itself being written down, ESU names “Kozak Holota,” found by the literary historian Mykhailo Voznyak in the Kondratsky songbook (1693). It was printed in the 19th century: according to ESU, Mykola Tsertelev’s songbook, published in St. Petersburg in 1819, was the first to print 9 pieces, and it was the historian Mykhailo Maksymovych who brought the term “duma” into scholarly literature.

1908: Recording the Voice

According to ESU’s entry “Kolessa, Filaret,” the folklorist Filaret Kolessa (1871–1947) traveled to the Poltava region in 1908 to record dumy on a phonograph, at the initiative of the poet Lesya Ukrainka and her husband, the folk-music researcher Klyment Kvitka.

IEU’s entry “Honcharenko, Hnat” writes that in the same year, 1908, Lesya Ukrainka brought the Kharkiv-region singer Hnat Honcharenko to Yalta and, with the help of Kvitka and the painter Opanas Slastion, recorded his dumy on wax cylinders. Kolessa transcribed these recordings into musical notation and published them as the two-volume Melodii Ukrainskykh Narodnykh Dum (Melodies of Ukrainian Folk Dumy) in 1910 and 1913. Lesya Ukrainka is covered in “The Poet on Ukraine’s 200-Hryvnia Note: Lesya Ukrainka and Her Play Forest Song.”

Kolessa believed the dumy arose among the common people and derived from funeral laments (голосіння). ESU adds that while the two share the form of recitation, their content and function differ greatly, so it can agree with this view only in part. IEU introduces another influential theory, that of Pavlo Zhytetsky, who held that folk song was joined by the influence of the syllabic verse taught in 16th- and 17th-century schools. Kolessa was also a researcher who addressed the connection between the 12th-century epic Tale of Ihor’s Campaign and the dumy, a subject covered in “The Epic Tale of Ihor’s Campaign, Whose Original Manuscript Burned in 1812.”

Reading the Dumy on the Page

IEU states that the study of dumy reached its scholarly peak with Kateryna Hrushevska’s two-volume Ukrainski Narodni Dumy (Ukrainian Folk Dumy, 1927–1931). As for translations, it names Polish (1837), German (1845), French (1876), and English (1916) versions, and names Marie Scherrer’s French translation (1947) and Yuriy Tarnawsky and Patricia Kilina’s English translation (1979) as the most substantial complete collections.

The first to study the melodies of the dumy was the composer Mykola Lysenko, who wrote about the performances of the singer Ostap Veresai (see “The Composer Mykola Lysenko, and Taras Bulba, the Opera Never Staged in His Lifetime”). Cossack-era songs still sung today in village choirs are introduced in “You Need a Lead Singer and a High Voice: the Cossack Songs of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.”