The fate of Khan Kenesary Kasymov's head between the Kunstkamera, Omsk and Gokhran

Returning to the skull of Sultan Kenesary Kasymov himself, the story of its wanderings through the back rooms of Russian museums has long interested many researchers.

The popular opinion is that the head is kept in the Kunstkamera or in the Hermitage itself. It is said that an ashtray was once made of it for the Tsar, and that it then found its way into the museum's collection. The Hermitage denies this, amusingly explaining that if it is not in the Kunstkamera, then it is nowhere.

The confusion over the whereabouts of the "exhibit" only confirms how little it matters to the state, whereas among the Kazakhs the return of the head of their universally beloved khan has in recent decades come to be regarded almost as a sacred duty. Kenesary Kasymov managed to unite all three Kazakh zhuzes under his rule in order to rise against the power of the Tsar; Soviet historiography was accustomed to calling him, an aristocrat and the inspirer of a national liberation movement, a rebel.

After his defeat by the Kyrgyz, on whose lands the Tsarist troops had pressed him, Kenesary was cruelly executed together with 19 other sultans. There are many testimonies about this, and, of course, legends. They say that the sultans were boiled alive, disembowelled alive, quartered; all of them were beheaded and presumably buried on the very spot of the execution. Kenesary's head, too, was severed from the body, it is not known under what circumstances, before or after his death; there is a version that it was given to the mother of the manaps he had killed. It is told that the khans' heads were carried for several months around the Kyrgyz and Semirechye auls and handed over to be mocked. Some time later Kenesary's skull turned up in Omsk, brought there by one of the killers. It is believed that they decided to present it to the Tsar, or simply to "the Russians", as a trophy.

From this point the muddle is greater still than with the execution of Kenesary. Whether it was presented to the Tsar or not, whether he would have accepted such a gift or not, whether a goblet, an ashtray or nothing at all was made of the head: none of this is known. And the traces of the skull did surface, not in Petersburg at all, but, strangely enough, in Omsk. In the private archive of an Omsk local historian a note was found stating that the chancellery of the Main Administration of Western Siberia had kept a file on the rebel Sultan Kasymov. And attached to the file was a human skull with an official seal on its forehead.

In the catalogues of the holdings of the Historical Archive of the Omsk Region, files connected with the uprising of Kenesary Khan were found. Unfortunately, there is no possibility of consulting them, since they bear the stamps "Especially valuable" and "For official use", which is rather odd for files essentially civil in nature.

From here spring legends wilder than that of the old woman who, after the execution, ran out of the crowd to claim the head of the murderer of her sons. They say that Kenesary's head was transferred to the Kunstkamera of the Hermitage, whence in time it was moved to the Institute of Ethnoses and Human Origins, and from there, after the liquidation of that institution, to the Gokhran of Russia. There are reports that the skull of Kenesary Kasymov appears on the list of historical rarities protected by the state. I have not seen these documents myself, apart from the note by a historian who died in 1971, which did speak of the Omsk period of Khan Kenesary's skull. The other testimonies seem to me doubtful, but of that another time.