Why in the Zaporizhzhya Sich was not women

Many writers, including Nikolai Gogol in his immortal "Taras Bulba", mentioned that Sich women were not allowed. There is an earlier mention of this fact, both in literature and in folklore. Obviously, this ancient oral tradition, handed down from generation to generation, and not to believe him, no reason.

Gogol published his story in 1835, and the first historical study of the life of the Cossacks, in which he discussed the gay part of the camp, wrote the historian Apollo Skalkovsky only in 1841. In the very first Chapter "the history of the New Sich, or the last Zaporozhian Kosh", the author writes that the Cossacks grass-roots troops, going to the camp, made a vow of celibacy.

Zaporozhian Sich on the island of Khortytsya. Modern reconstruction

Skalkovsky draws an analogy between the Cossacks and the knight's Templars, the knights and swordsmen, which also forbade their members to marry. The researcher is convinced that the Cossacks were Ukrainian Orthodox chivalric military spiritual order, however, particularly adapted to the Orthodoxy and Slavic mentality form.

This theory has supporters and in our days, the modern historian of the Roman Bagdasarov even published a scientific article "Earthly image of the angelic hosts. Sich as an Orthodox knightly order". But this is one point of view, romanticized Cossacks and turning them into defenders of the faith, and besides it there is another, less beautiful.

But to deny the fact that among the Cossacks was full of married men, no one is taken from writers and scholars. Even the main epic hero of Gogol's novel, Taras — man married and raised three sons. Yes, the Sich women the path was closed, but the family soldiers there were glad to see always. However, in that case, if the wife was waiting for them at home. The Cossacks could always return to the family, if the Sich fought.

One of the most reputable Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky argued that in the heyday of the Zaporizhzhya Sich, which falls on the 16th-17th century, the army was as staunch bachelors and the power of family men. For many married Cossacks Sich has become a temporary refuge from everyday life. The man went into the army, participated in the free Cossack life, but "after" at any time could go home.

From various sources we know that shortly before the elimination of Zaporizhzhya Sich in the 18th century its orders softened somewhat and attitudes toward women was not that categorical. At this time there was some semblance of a Cossack Republic, which occupied a rather extensive territory in the so-called Great meadows — area along the Dnieper, below the rapids.

The Cossacks never called themselves "lesarstva" and believed the military aristocracy. In their society there were many knightly orders from Europe, but even more from the primitive society, forced to introduce a gender separation in order to survive on the outskirts of civilization. The most logical explanation for the fact that Sich did not admit women, there was a fear of the Cossacks, that the presence of women would weaken their chivalrous spirit.