Peter the Great, Tsar of All Russia went on a trip through Europe, “incognito.” Along the way he made some boats, learned some science, and had some fun. When he got back, he made everyone shave off their beards! The time lives on in history.
He might have considered making hair art out of all of that shaved hair! Hair art was common through the Victorian era, and was a way to remember loved ones, show family unity, or raise funds, as you’ll learn from the “Hairy Eagle.”
Peter the Great Does Europe, By Mick Sullivan
By the time he was 22 years old, Peter Alekseyevich Romanov had seen a lot: Battles, uprisings, a lot of blood, and enough political turmoil to drive most people to the cold wilds of Russia for the relative peace and quiet. His Russian homeland was huge, though not very populated – but it was all his. Since the age of 10, following the death of his father, Peter had tag-team ruled Russia with his half-brother Ivan. Together over the Empire, the young men were Co-Tsars. But his brother’s health was poor, and when he died too, that left 22-year-old Peter as the Tsar of All Russia. He had seen a lot. But there was plenty more he hadn’t seen. And Peter wanted to cross a few things off of his list.
One thing he had seen plenty of was beards. They were on faces all over Russia. Beards were a tradition – some people even believed the facial hair represented a kind of religious purity. Plus, there wasn’t a particularly strong sense of fashion in Russia in the 1600s. Things were more practical. Saving money and keeping warm – those were two important things for most people. Heavy beards were warm, no fuss, and could be pretty intimidating looking to strangers.
Of course, saving money wasn’t such an issue for Tsar of All of Russia. That title came with tremendous wealth, so Peter had plenty of dough to throw around. And come to think of it, being intimidating was pretty easy for him too. Aside from his powerful title of Tsar, he was also taller than everyone he met.
How tall are you?
6-7.
Like six or seven?
6-7
Yes, he was six feet seven inches tall. In the 1600s there were not many people taller than him. This always made him the center of attention – which sometimes was good. Sometimes not so much, as you’ll soon see.
When younger he had been temporarily exiled with his mother, north of Moscow. There, while roaming the countryside, Peter saw an old sailboat in a rundown barn. It wasn’t in good shape, but it grabbed him. Not many people in Russia knew about boats. There was little need. Other than a few lakes, there were not many places to sail. Russia was landlocked – and no ocean front property meant Russia had no navy. Other nations in Europe and Asia were prowling the seas, and had been for centuries. But not Russia. This was a problem at the time, because a Navy meant a nation could have access to the world and all of it’s riches and wonder. Peter and the Russians were stuck on land. It was a lot of land, but it was cold and so big that travel was hard.
Luckily little Peter met a German man living in the area who knew about boats. He explained to young Peter that with a sail, a boat could move without human power – and more amazingly, depending on how you have the sail set, you could sail into the wind. The man agreed to help the boy fix up the boat and learn to sail. Peter was obsessed.
I’m the king of the world. Well, actually, I’m the Tsar of all Russia… but who knows what the future holds!
Years later, adult Tsar of All Russia Peter still wanted to know more. The young ruler wanted to know how to build boats. He wanted Russia to have a Navy. There were tools he had seen and heard about that he wanted to learn how to use. He wanted to learn about the scientific developments popping up across Europe. There were cells being discovered, electricity being dabbled with, navigation advancements being defined, and philosophies being framed. It all felt foreign – so far away from his world, but he knew Russia would benefit from it all, and bringing these ideas and knowledge to the far-flung yet huge kingdom could bring the nation power to match the massive size of the motherland. And boats were a key to him – if he knew more about boats, maybe they could start a navy.
Also, there were many other powers in Europe, and he wanted allies – and to learn about enemies. So he did what any 6 foot 7inch tall Tsar of a massive empire would do. He went undercover. And he didn’t do it alone – he took 250 friends.
Hello I am Peter, ahem, Mikhailov. These are my friends. We are but weary travelers who have come to visit Holland.
Oh yes, Mr. Mikhailov (wink wink wink) very nice to meet you. Where did you say you were from?
Oh that is no matter! I like your smooth face.
Thanks! I shaved it myself! Anyway, sure have a lot of friend with you – must be an expensive group of people to entertain. And Jeez, I’ve never seen anyone as tall as you. Just how tall are you?
6-7?
Wow. Well, Peter, the Gr..Mikhailov, what can we do for you?
I want to see you build boats! In fact I want to help!
Ohhhkay…
After making his way across eastern Europe, Peter (ahem) Mikhailov got a job at the boatyards in Zandam. For weeks, the secret Tsar woke up and walked to work each morning with his own tools and diligently worked beside people who made boats everyday of their lives and had but a fraction of the money and none of the power of their new co-worker. Maybe they knew, maybe they didn’t, But soon, his height and downplayed celebrity garnered attention. People gathered on lawns, even stood on rooftops to watch him head to work in the mornings.
Who are you? King of Russia or something?
How tall are you? Like 6-7?
Once some un-wise and unkind young town punks even threw dirt at him. If they’d known who he really was they would have thought twice about it. He’d do a lot of bad things to a lot of people for a lot less over the years as Tsar.
Fed up with the attention, he and his gang went on to Amsterdam, where the Dutch East India Company had a shipyard behind tall walls that would keep him private. For over four months, the tsar of Russia and his huge gang of friends, most of them bearded and big, lived “incognito,” cutting boards, hammering nails, and raising masts. He also met a lot of people, including microscope pioneer Antonie von leeuwenhoeck, who gave him a special gift – you might remember a scene like this from a previous episode of The Past And the Curious.
I can’t show you my newest microscopes, no matter who you may or may not be. I’m still working on them and they are my secret.
That’s disappointing.
But I have a gift for you, it’s an eel viewer – a small box with a lens for looking into the tiny parts of an eel.
I love eels!
I’ve heard that about you.
Someone bring me an eel!
Peter’s presence wasn’t exactly a secret. On one hand he didn’t want people to know who he was, because then he’d have to deal with ceremonies and pomp and requests, and all the hullaballo that comes with being a political leader in another land. And he could work side by side with normal craftsman. It was probably enjoyable, in addition to educational for him. But on the other hand, he kinda did want certain people to know it was him. That way he’d get parties, free dinners, and gifts like super sweet eel viewing microscopes and stuff. But despite all of the fun, he wanted to make friends, see the cultural developments of Europoe, and he wanted to know how to build boats.
Don’t you guys have any plans? Any books? Any blueprints?
Peter, the Great…est thing about the tradition of ship building in Holland is that it lives in our heads.
Excuse me.
Did you burp? Oh you’re excused.
No what did you call me?
I said, Peter, the Great…est thing about our ship building is we do it from memory.
You called me…You know what never mind. So there’s nothing written?
Tsar-tainly not.
See there you go again. I could have sworn you said Tsar and almost called me Peter the Great. How weird of you.
Weird indeed. I most Tsartainly did not. I know you are but a humble 6-7 carpenter who is Romanov-er the land.
Romanover? Come on! Okay so no blueprints?
No blueprints.
Luckily, William III invited him to England. The ship builders there had plans Peter could learn from. It might be a gamble for one king to offer such help to another king, but William wanted any help he could get in pushing back against France. So it was a gamble he was willing to make. For months Peter and his many friends enjoyed the society of England.
Peter was amazed with the fashion. Women wore corsets and dresses of beautiful fabric. Men wore all sorts of things, except for the heavy dark boring clothes his gang used to keep them warm in Russian Winters. No one wore that here. And with the fashion came culture – music, art, theatre – the good stuff in life. Also on display throughout England and the rest of Europe were the whisker-less cheeks of men left and right. Barely a beard in sight.
The boats, the fashion, the art, the science, and the bare cheeks. He would bring it all back to the motherland. Along with one other thing.
While living with his wild crew in England, they were invited to stay in the large estate home of a wealthy British man. It was a beautiful place that filled the owner with pride, but perhaps above all this man loved his garden. He believed it was the finest garden for miles. Perhaps he was right. And a beautiful garden requires lots of tools – shovels, spades, shears, and such. But one great tool, especially if you have to move soil, is a wheelbarrow. And Peter and his friends had never seen a wheelbarrow before.
Of course, as a bunch of wild guys on a vacation, they couldn’t help themselves. The Russian travelers did what any unruly pack of people would do with a bunch of wheelbarrows – they had wheelbarrow races. One person in the bucket, one person pushing. Don’t get any ideas at home. Their stopping point in these races was the treasured shrubbery of their host – which they crashed into. Plus, their many many wild races left deep divots, ditches, broken branches, and trampled plants. In today’s world of AirBNB they would have gotten a one star review as disrespectful and destructive guests.
The disrespect wasn’t limited to the garden either, when they left, finally making their long way back to Russia, the owner was dismayed to find that there were absolutely no – zero, zilch, zip – no chairs left in the entire house. The travelers smashed them all and used them as fire wood. Carpets had to be thrown out, there was food rotting in corners, the walls were so bad the whole place had to be repainted. It was a mess. And the Tsar of Russia wasn’t stuck with the bill – he was a guest! And Technically, the tsar was never even here. It was some dude named Peter Mikhailov who was 6-7.
In the end, the Tsar of all Russia had been out of his homeland, in poor disguise, for over a year. He had left a friend in charge back in Russia, but his return was badly needed.
When Peter finally made it back to Russia one of the first things he did was pass a law against beards. He even shaved a few faces himself. Peter wanted a culture shift in Russia. And this was a big step in his mind. Perhaps it was symbolic of Russia joining the age of change moving across Europe, but it was a big deal. And he wasn’t a total facial hair hater. He had a mustache. And Anyone attached to their beard always had the option to pay a tax to keep their cheeks fuzzy.
Peter the Great changed Russia profoundly. And don’t get the wrong idea. He did some incredibly bad things – things which are not good fodder for a history podcast aimed at kids and families, but his time romping through Europe as a supposedly normal dude who just so happened to travel through the continent with a crew of 200+ people, was a defining moment both in global politics and in facial hair acceptance.
Hair Art and the Hairy Eagle
Hello friends, it’s the hair baron coming to you with an offer you can’t refuse. If you act right now, you, yes you, can own a handful of history. Okay, I’ll be honest with you it’s only a handful if you have tiny hands…but if you’re a grown-up maybe it’s more like a pinch of history. Pinch of who you might ask? A pinch of King George the III monarch of England from 1760-1820. You know, the guy who vastly expanded the British Empire, lost the American Continent, but sang You’ll Be Back in the hit Broadway musical Hamilton.
I’ve got one syllable for you: Hair. That’s right people, for a modest and meager 7000 pounds, a wispy tangle of some of George’s hair, strings from the king, split ends from the sovereign, strands from the man, once adorning the head of the head of England. The frizzy little tangle can be yours. Run tests! See if his health decline was from lead poisoning or something else! Try to clone him. Just pull it out at parties to amaze your friends. Imagine: The King of England, in your house! George III’s hair will not last at this price! Folli-call us now and we’ll throw in some hair from another less famous member of the royal family. Your pick!
No joke, if you want to buy King George’s hair, some is currently for sale – 7000 pounds, or about $9400 for a messy little knot. Now if you’ve got the money to burn, but aren’t itching for King George’s locks, you can currently buy, for about the same price, hair from Actor Cillian Murphy – which seems weird, because he’s still very much alive and currently producing more hair. Or you could buy a lock from Elvis Presley’s head for $200,000, or get a relative bargain for celebrity hair from actor Kevin Costner for a mere $500.
All of this hair is documented, credentialed ,and guaranteed to be genuine, which makes it, to some people, highly collectible today. But it might surprise you to learn that at times in our history, hair has been not just an acceptable token to remember people, but a coveted one. Hair has meant a lot to many people, and it’s not just about the hair from famous, or no-longer living people – people treasured hair from the regular people in their lives – living or dead.
If you were alive in the 1800s, you might not even bat an eye when someone gave you a Valentine that included, not a piece of candy, but a lock of their hair. Or you might wear a piece of jewelry that is made from the hair of someone you love.
Sound gross? Hair is funny like that. Most people would agree it’s perfectly fine on someone’s head, but as soon as it’s cut off, things seem to instantly change in our eyes. Picture the floor at a barbershop after someone’s had a trim – it’s not such a great image is it? It’s easy to get grossed out by hair. Often times, people seeing old things made of hair often have an initial reaction of disgust or aversion. That hair was something so personal and once part of another person, and now it’s just…there in a museum. But it turns out hair is a huge part of many historical collections.
Take America’s Library of Congress – this is the research library that is the official library of US Congress, the de facto National Library of America, which also houses the US Patent Office.
The Library of Congress has hundreds of millions of documents, letters, images, photos, and writings in over 470 languages. They also have a lot of hair. Walt Whitman’s Hair, Thomas Jefferson’s Hair, Beethoven’s Hair, even hair from some random dude named Carl from the Civil War.
There and in similar places, archivists, historians, and scientists have discovered something unusual about hair – it’s very stable, and it doesn’t change. Clip off some hair and it will remain exactly the same for centuries. Was it grey and curly? It will stay that way. Was it red and wavy? straight and brown? Well, we believe it will remain exactly the same for incredibly long into the future. Perfectly preserved. It also is a health record. Thanks to testing hair samples of Ludwig Von Beethoven, scientists have determined that the levels of lead in his blood were tremendously high, and that’s dangerous. High lead levels would explain the sicknesses that plagued him for much of his life. Who knows, maybe a healthier lead-free environment would have given us more years of his musical genius.
But you may ask, how did all of this hair get clipped off of heads in the first place? That answer varies. Sometimes, at someone’s deathbed, people would clip a bit as a keepsake – so a more than a few people were buried with a patchy scalp or at least what looked like a bad haircut thanks to some overzealous scissor-wielders. Oftentimes, though the totally alive hair owner would clip a bit themselves and give it to a loved one – often in the mail – if you couldn’t see someone and you didn’t have any photographs, a little bit of hair was an easy way to remember someone and feel a connection. Sometimes that hair gift was wrapped in a nice little ribbon and kept in the in the pages of a book, or the folds of a pocket. Some people set the special strands in a necklace locket, or in the place of a gem on a ring on their fingers.
Very commonly, hair was even displayed in a place of prominence on the wall of the home. Several Magazines in the late 1800s published ornate patterns for people interested in twisting, weaving, and braiding hair to make their own hair wreaths. Yeah. That’s right. A wreath for your wall but made entirely of human hair. You’d be surprised how many surviving hair wreaths from there are from the 1800s. And while many people used hair in mourning, this was a little different. Family members would save and donate their hair and then the wreath could be carefully crafted as a symbol of family unity – each one contained a little bit of everyone. You can still find the patterns if you wanna give it a try!
These are a few common reasons hair would be cut for preservation, but there’s one more way: If people admired you, they might just ask for a lock of hair like they’d ask for an autograph! And sometimes the answer was yes. Usually, the hair gift was just a small clipping, but not always.
There’s a story that survives about a man named Thaddeus Stevens, a politician from Pennsylvania active before and during the Civil War. He was a fiery speaker who happened to lose his hair in early adulthood, many say as a result of typhoid – he called it brain fever. Anyway after losing his hair he bought a wig, but as a guy who wasn’t very fussy about fashion and usually in a hurry, he just had it cut to be exactly the same on all sides. That way he could just throw it on his head as he walked out the door and not have to adjust it or get it seated properly. The result was a humorously bad wig to many. However one woman who heard him speak had no knowledge of the wig. She was moved by his words at the pulpit and approached him afterwards, asking if she might have a small clipping of his hair to remember the moment by. This was, of course, not an unusual request at the time. But he was an unusual man, and it is said he looked at the woman, humorously removed the wig to her dismay, and suggested that she just take all of it!
One of his wigs remains preserved in a collection in Pennsylvania. Not far away in Syracuse New York sits perhaps the most valuable and rarely seen piece of hair art in history. And one that used hair to raise money for charity.
History lovers, I give you the hairy eagle.
Oh my, that’s only been seen publicly 3 times over the last century.
Yes, the hairy eagle is exceedingly rare.
Did he say recedingly hair?
No Exceedingly rare.
What kind of eagle has hair?
Not just any eagle my friend. This was made in 1861, with
Where are it’s feathers?
Well, it’s not a real eagle, it’s just a piece of art made of…
Is it laying an egg?
No that’s a globe.
Oh, what I would give to be the museum tour guide who gets to talk about the Hairy Eagle. The Hairy Eagle is a special thing for sure. mounted on a gold framed circle that’s about a foot wide, the art depicts an eagle, standing on a globe, and it is in fact, made of 37 different people’s hair.
In addition to cuts from Abraham and Mary Lincoln’s hair, there are 35 other notable people from the time around the Civil War whose hair is also ornately included in the Hairy Eagle. Originally, crafted to raise funds for troops, the Hairy Eagle was displayed in New York City – with a goal in 1861 of using it to raise $1000, curious public paid $1 to take a peek at the creation. They raised much more than $1000, as it would turn out, but after the war it disappeared. It finally reappeared in the 1920s when it was donated to the Onondaga Historical Society. Since then it is rarely seen by the public, nevertheless, it remains one of the most unusual and valuable pieces of hair art from anytime in our past.
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