Dmitry Hrynkevich: The sad death of the tall man

Dmitry Hrynkevich was an uncommon man who, in Tralee where he lived, was a common sight. At 7 feet 6 inches tall, it was impossible not to notice him. At 24, Hrynkevich was the third tallest man in Ireland. On Friday the 2nd of October, he died as a result of a brutal assault perpetrated at a party in his own home. He had been found on his front lawn by local Gardaí, suffering from catastrophic head injuries. Two men were arrested and later released without charge. An investigation is ongoing.

Gardaí initially said that his stature may have been a factor in his death and, while it seems increasingly unlikely that this is the case, the public’s fascination with Hrynkevich’s stature continues unabated.

His appearance on the street in the small south-western town would turn heads and even stop traffic. Shamefully, this is known to be truth and not just conjecture because, as a Tralee native, I was part of that public audience. Anyone who ever took notice of him was guilty of that, and there could be no doubt that he saw all of us gawping. It was the same in Killarney, where he grew up having moved here as young child from Minsk in Belarus. We’ll never conclusively know how our collective intrusion made him feel, but the pressure of constant observation must have been relentless. It must have been crushing.

Before his death, it was noted that Hrynkevich had been involved in petty crime. In February of this year, he was arrested with two other men in connection with the theft of a flute and other musical equipment. A few days before he was murdered, he was attacked in the town square. After his death, darker, unsubstantiated rumours started to swirl amongst local news journalists. It is still not known if his death was planned.

As a result of his height, which was due to a condition of pituitary gigantism, Dmitry Hrynkevich has been crystallised as a complicated, tragic figure. Historically, men of his stature were routinely denigrated and dehumanised. The original ‘Irish Giant’, Charles Byrne, met a similar end – stripped of his dignity under a public spotlight.

At 7 feet 7 inches, Byrne was only one inch taller than Hrynkevich. In 18th century Tyrone, where he was born, he was a local celebrity making pocket money from entertaining at parties and appearing at local militia rallies. He was, of course, subjected to stares and scrutiny and suffered from terrible growing pains. Rumours swirled. It was said that he was conceived on top of a haystack – how else could such a tall person be born to average parents?

In 1782, at 21, he moved from the isolated village of Drummullan to London to try to earn his fortune. A year later, Charles Byrne was dead.

Initially, it is said that Byrne was happy to be in London. He took an apartment near Charing Cross and charged a hefty fee to ‘entertain’ middle and upper-class visitors. It was probably there that he attracted the attention of Scottish surgeon and anatomy expert, John Hunter. In 1783, Hunter was in the process of organising some 14,000 plant and animal specimens into a teaching museum and he wanted Byrne’s bones to be the centrepiece of his collection. He offered Byrne several hundred pounds for his body after his death, which Hunter correctly estimated was not far off.

It was through this exchange that Byrne found out that, at 22, he was dying. He didn’t know it, but he had acromegaly, a tumour on his pituitary gland that meant he was doomed to constant growth. He self-medicated with alcohol, trying to counteract the debilitating pain that he now knew would never stop. Public interest in Byrne as an entertainer waned as more self-proclaimed Irish giants came on the scene. He would turn up for appointments drunk and late, or not at all. He moved to a smaller apartment and charged less for appearances.

Despite refusing to sell his body to Hunter (dissection and display being a fate then reserved for particularly infamous criminals), the surgeon was relentless. He employed a man to follow Byrne at all times. This man did not intervene when Byrne collapsed on the street after a night of heavy drinking and had his life savings stolen from his pocket. Hunter was not interested in the man. He only wanted the body.

Byrne was determined not to concede to the fate that Hunter had planned for him. Death being near, he had already arranged the details of his funeral and wanted to be buried at sea. But through a mixture of bribery and subterfuge, a coffin full of rocks was eventually thrown into choppy waters off the coast of Margate and Hunter was united in London with his quarry. Together with his assistants, it is claimed that he boiled Byrne’s body in water until the flesh came off the bones.

It was done in such haste that Hunter did not even dissect the body. If he had cut through the unusually thick skull, he might have seen the enlarged pituitary fossa that determined Byrne’s size, the complicated, tangled morass of sinus cavities that would cause him such blinding pains. That discovery would not be made until 1909, a period of over a hundred years in which Byrne would languish as a footnote in the annals of human abnormality.

Four years after his death, Byrne’s reassembled skeleton was put on display at what would later become the Hunterian Museum. It is still on display today.

It has now been over a month and no arrests have been made in Hrynkevich’s murder investigation. Gardaí are still pursuing several lines of enquiry. Like Byrne two years his senior, Dmitry Hrynkevich had also made plans for his funeral. According to his death notice the funeral was “strictly private” at his own request.

All of us who are not taller than most, not smaller than most, those of us who are able bodied, those of us who conform to physical conventions – we know what it is to unexpectedly see someone unlike us. The surprise, the double take, the shameless, unchecked rubbernecking.

As adults, most of us make a conscious effort not to stare. But some of us don’t. Those who by circumstance or choice do not fit the rigid medical textbook parameters of ‘average’ feel the accumulation of those unfiltered, unwanted looks. As with Byrne and Hrynkevich, those who are considered physical outsiders are robbed of their voices, divested of autonomy and agency. They become public property against their wills, referred to with insultingly neutered platitudes like ‘gentle giant’.

Byrne still bears the weight of that burden even two centuries after his death, and even if Hrynkevich’s murder had nothing to do with his size, the two will forever be interlinked through the public gaze.

We like to believe that society has changed dramatically since Byrne’s death, but the treatment of Hrynkevich shows how far we haven’t come. The public ability to fetishise bodies based on something as arbitrary as height is symptomatic of a collective ignorance that has yet to be properly tackled. We need to learn to respect physical differences and the wishes of people with those differences, not to bully them in life or put them on display in death.