Name: Onfim’s self-portrait (Gramota No. 200)
What it is: An inscribed piece of birch bark
Where it is from: Novgorod, Russia
When it was made: Around 1260
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What it tells us about the past:
Around 800 years ago, a 7-year-old boy named Onfim seems to have gotten bored with doing schoolwork and instead drew himself as a horseback rider slaying an enemy. Onfim, who scrawled his name on his entertaining sketches, doodled on more than a dozen thin pieces of birch bark in the mid-13th century, and his artistic talent was preserved for centuries by the wet, low-oxygen soil of his native Novgorod, a medieval East Slavic state that later became part of Russia.
Known as Gramota No. 200, Onfim’s self-portrait includes his Cyrillic alphabet exercises above a drawing of a horse, a sword-like weapon, a defeated enemy and, next to a depiction of himself, his signature: ОНѲИМЄ. The crudely drawn stick figures — a clue that he drew them at around 7 years of age — have severe expressions, round torsos, long legs and too few fingers on the hands.
In 1951, archaeologists in Novgorod discovered the first Old Russian birch-bark texts, and more than 1,200 of them have been found to date. Before the availability of paper, soft birch bark was scratched with metal or bone implements. The dimensions of the birch-bark texts vary, but most are about the size of a postcard. Russian historian Valentin Yanin has estimated that there may be more than 20,000 additional texts yet to be excavated from the wet, clay-like soils.
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The city of Novgorod — located in western Russia, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of St. Petersburg — was a major trade center in the medieval period and, as such, had high rates of literacy. The Novgorod birch-bark texts largely deal with commercial transactions or transcriptions of Bible passages.
But Onfim’s work is a bit different. Although he also jotted down psalms and hymns, most of his manuscripts contained figural doodles, and their delightfully simple style has made him the most famous person in the Novgorod birch-bark texts — as well as the creator of some of the earliest child-produced artwork ever found.
Unfortunately, there is no historical evidence to reveal what happened to Onfim as he grew up. Did he become a merchant or a monk? Did he ever actually ride horseback and slay his enemies? Although we don’t know Onfim’s fate, his 800-year-old doodles have left an indelible mark on history.
