Muzhylovsky, Syluian

Muzhylovsky, Syluian or Samuil [Мужиловський, Силуян; Mužylovs'kyj, Sylujan], b ?, d December 1654. Cossack starshyna and diplomat; son of Andrii Muzhylovsky. He was one of the students at the Kyivan Cave Monastery School who delivered the panegyric ‘Eucharisterion’ to Metropolitan Petro Mohyla on Easter Sunday in 1632. During the Cossack-Polish War he was Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s envoy in Moscow (with Kindrat Burliai, 1649, 1653), Lithuania (1649), Turkey (1651), and the Crimean Khanate (1653). In 1649 he toured Ukraine as Khmelnytsky’s representative with the Patriarch of Jerusalem Paisios, who greeted Khmelnytsky at the gates of Kyiv. In 1654, as judge of Nizhyn regiment and the Belarusian regiment, he participated in the Belarusian campaign of the acting hetman Ivan Zolotarenko, who killed him during a heated argument. While in Moscow in 1649, Muzhylovsky kept historically valuable notes; they were published in Ukraïna (1914–30) (1914, no. 2).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]