‘It’s Crazy’: The Scramble for Ancient Treasures After Ukraine’s Dam Disaster

One summer evening as the sun sank behind the Dnipro River, the mammoth waterway that bisects Ukraine, Anatolii Volkov walked along a river beach, head down.

A Ukrainian archaeologist, Mr. Volkov looked as if he was just taking a stroll. But he was actually examining the mostly dried-up ground of a former reservoir that has revealed a treasure trove of artifacts after a catastrophic explosion at the Kakhovka dam sent 4.8 trillion gallons of water gushing downstream, emptying the reservoir and scraping away the sand and silt that had covered the objects for centuries.

“Look at this,” he said.

He bent down and picked up an object about two inches long. He rubbed his fingers over the grooves.

“Pottery shard,” he said. “Bronze Age. Three thousand years old. At least.”

Even before the war, Ukrainian archaeologists had their hands full in a big country rich with archaeological sites and not many expert diggers to study them. But when the conflict erupted in February 2022, it made their painstakingly slow and methodical work that much harder.

Russian troops smashed into history museums and looted priceless antiquities. The soldiers and their war machines moved into archaeological sites, including ancient burial grounds. Some sites became engulfed in frontline fighting. So have many Ukrainian archaeologists themselves, who, like other professionals, have enlisted in the army to fight for their country. Some have been killed.

In that bleak tableau, the plethora of artifacts littering the reservoir area has been a small but welcome recompense. The dam was blown up in June, most likely by Russian forces trying to swamp Ukrainian troops and cut off one of the only crossings left on the Dnipro. The destruction triggered horrendous flooding and drained the reservoir, which had been one of the largest lakes in Europe.

In the weeks since, Ukrainian archaeologists and scavenger hunters have discovered all sorts of things: pieces of stone axes at least 1,000 years old; Nazi-era helmets; an old bridge; Cossack cannon balls from the 17th century; and flint rock from the Russia-Turkey wars of the 18th century (a lot of war stuff, actually).

“There’s never been anything like this,” said Yevhen Synytsia, chairman of the Ukrainian Association of Archaeologists. “It’s crazy.”

It’s also deeply meaningful.

The war in Ukraine is, at its heart, a battle for Ukrainian identity. Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s leader, has constantly belittled Ukrainian independence and taken the same dim view of Ukraine as Soviet strongmen like Stalin and the czars before him. In their eyes, the country is nothing more than a Russian appendage, lacking a distinct culture, language and history.

This is precisely where the Ukrainian archaeologists come in.

“We’re finding pieces of ancient culture, our ancient culture,” said Viacheslav Sarychev, the scientific secretary of the Khortytsia National Reserve at the northern reaches of the reservoir area. “Piece by piece, we’re distancing ourselves from Russia.”

“This is extremely important to us,” he added.

The objects are washed, sorted, examined and cataloged. Mr. Volkov has hundreds of them scattered across his desk and on the windowsill behind him at the Khortytsia reserve, where he works. He’s just one member of a growing team of archaeologists pouring in.

For a profession that measures things in centuries, the archaeologists feel an unusual pressure to work fast. First, there are the “underground archaeologists,” as the real archaeologists call them, opportunists who have shown up in recent weeks to sneak onto the lake bed in search of pieces for the underground antiquities trade.

Police officers have already apprehended several men walking around the restricted areas with metal detectors and big headphones.

But then there’s the bigger pressure of all this potential history disappearing again. Ukrainian officials have said that when the war is over, they will rebuild the dam, which will refill the lake, which will bury all the potential finds again.

This area was plunged underwater in 1956, when the dam was completed as part of a major hydroelectric plant. Soviet archaeologists had surveyed it, though, as Mr. Synytsia said, “no one paid any attention to Ukrainian identity back then.”

“So much was lost,” he added.

Khortytsia is a cradle of Ukrainian history. An island sitting in the middle of the Dnipro River, it has been inhabited by humans for thousands of years. It was full of deer and rabbits and thick with bushes, the perfect pit stop for early travelers heading down the Dnipro on their way to the Black Sea.

More recently, say, 500 years ago, it became a fortress for the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks, a military community from the eastern European steppes that played a prominent role in building a Ukrainian state.

Many of the most interesting discoveries from the dam disaster have been found just off the island’s rocky shores. Ukrainian archaeologists were ecstatic a few weeks ago to excavate a 20-foot-long oak boat half-buried in the sand and carved with mysterious symbols. It was at least five centuries old.

What Mr. Volkov unearths on his evening forays is usually more modest; chips of ancient pots, say, or crooked Cossack nails. However fragmented or rusty, they’re all interesting. Archaeologists like him think deeply about the passage of time and what happens to things as the centuries wash over them.

“We call it archaeological intelligence,” Mr. Volkov said.

He spoke as he walked, head down, looking for more treasures.

It was nearly night, and the sky was turning a rich dark blue, the color the reservoir used to be before it dried up into miles of cracked clay.

Oleksandra Mykolyshyn and Evelina Riabenko contributed reporting.