A document from the personal archive of the Ukrainian historian Volodymyr Holobutsky – a certificate of Simon Petlyura’s marriage to Olga Bilska, dated 1915, has been put up for auction again. This document has already been tried twice to be sold at the Violity auction. At first it was purchased for UAH 601,000, but the buyers never bought the lot. The next time, the bidding did not reach the reserve price of UAH 750,000. Now the certificate has appeared on sale again – already with a fixed price of UAH 900,000 for platform “Antiquarian book”.
“Transfer to the buyer is possible only at a personal meeting in the presence of the owners, descendants of Golubutsky. The lot is displayed due to non-purchase,” explained the seller Vitaly Ryabtsev.
Symon Petlyura and Olga Bilska got married at the beginning of 1915 in the Transfiguration Church of Lyubertsy near Moscow. The event was confirmed by a wedding certificate of the future head of the UNR Directorate and his wife, who later became the first lady of the young Ukrainian state.
The record book of the Transfiguration Church for 1915 is kept in the Central State Archive of Moscow. The couple received an extract from it in the fall of the same year, when they had already been together for seven years. Their daughter Lesya was born in 1911, but Petliura officially legalized the relationship only before leaving for the front.
Olga Bilska-Petlyura outlived her husband by 33 years. In 1944, she also lost her daughter, who died of tuberculosis. Historian Volodymyr Holobutsky kept the document a secret from the Soviet authorities for a long time. Despite ideological pressure, he researched Ukrainian history and even sent a letter to Joseph Stalin in 1952 denying the use of the term “reunification” in relation to Ukraine-Russia relations.
Holobutsky kept the certificate with him for many years. It was reproduced in Dmytro Stepovyk’s book Simon Petliura and his family. Documents and materials” (1996) and was first published in the press back in 1991 in the column of the newspaper “Knyzhkovy svit”.
