Hanga Baba

Taras Shevchenko. Hang Baba. Colored paper, watercolor (17.8 × 28.7 cm). [No sooner 22.V 1851 – VII 1857]. Taras Shevchenko National Museum, inv. g – 542.

Named for the same etching Br. Zaleski [album «La vie des steppes Kirghizes», Paris, 1865, Table 51].

Hang Baba – tract, located 30 km east of Novopetrovsk building. As noted by Br. Zaleski in a footnote to the letter Shevchenko is – a mountain valley on the peninsula Mangyshlak where "there are few large mulberry trees stripped of leaves and dozens of small, covered with greenery. Is there an extensive cemetery Kyrgyz. There we stopped leaving and returning when we were looking Antipov deposits of coal" [Ivan Franko, . – "Leaves to the wreath on the grave of Shevchenko", Lviv, 1890, p. 37 – 38].

In the tract Hang Baba Shevchenko was twice while Kara-Tau expedition, and several times in subsequent years.

In a letter to Br. Zaleski from 25.IX 1855 Shevchenko recalls about sharing their visit to the area: "Yesterday I was at Hanga-Baba, went through all the ravines, bowed like old friends, the trees from which we once painted…"

About tract Hang Baba also tells in her memoirs A. Uskova:

"The place of Hanga-Baba lovely, but I was there only once: the mountains are located on 3 sides, in the gorges of growing mulberry trees. At the foot of the mountains stretches a beautiful, green fields, on which there is a huge mulberry tree, in a volume of 2 fathoms… Under the tree organized camp, where between the youth placed Shevchenko" [Institute of Literature. Shevchenko USSR Academy of Sciences, Kyiv, Department of Manuscripts, p. 77/ 124].

Other sketches tract Hanga Baba see number 71, 106, 125, 126, 128.

In the literature is found under the title: "Kyrgyz cemetery" ["Catalogue of V. Tarnowski's museum of ukrainian antiquities", Vol. II, Chernigov, 1900, p. 184, № 305], " Turkmen cemetery" [«T. Shevchenko. By the 125th anniversary of his birth. Materials for the anniversary of the libraries ' K. – X., 1939, p. 38].

Storage areas: V. Tarnowski's Chernihiv museum of ukrainian antiquities – № 305, Chernihiv Historical Museum, Gallery of pictures by T.H. Shevchenko (Kharkiv).

In 1929 was displayed at the exhibition of works of Taras Shevchenko in Chernihiv (Catalogue, p. 20, № 55).

I. M. Verykivska, G. P. Palamarchuk, N. P. Prokopenko

After publication: Taras Shevchenko Complete Works in 10 volumes. – Kyiv: ed. Academy of sciences of UkrSSR, 1964, Vol. 9, № 1 (image), p. 5 (notes).