New Evidences on the Life and Activities of Alexander Yacimirskiy, Professor from Rostov

Professor Alexander Yacimirskiy (1873–1925), native from Bessarabia, was an internationally-known expert of medieval Slavic manuscripts, especially from the Southern Slavic lands. He was the author of the first serious monograph on the ecclesiastical, political activities and heritage of Metropolit Grigorii Tamblac, an outstanding figure in the history of the Orthodox Church and Medieval Slavic and Romanian Culture. He published also a lot of works on the history of medieval Slavic literatures, modern Polish literature, as well as on the Slavic and the Romanian folklore and ethnography, on the medieval cultural and ecclesiastical ties between Slavs and Romanians. For many years he was the editor of texts on the Slavic philology for the Encyclopedia of Brokhaus and Efron and wrote a lot of articles for this multi-volume edition. The heritage of Yacimirskiy stored in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, the State Archive of Russian Federation, the Municipal Historical Archive of Moscow and other Russian archives (and first of all his correspondence) broaden our knowledge of his contacts with his Russian and foreign colleagues – experts on the Slavic and South-East European studies. The new sources also add some important details to our knowledge of his activities in the last years of his life in the city of Rostov-on-Don where he was evacuated with the Warsaw University in 1915. He headed the so called Don Institute of Archaeology in Rostov aimed at the training of specialists for museums, archives and libraries. He taught history and philology in high schools of Rostov and Novocherkassk and made a valuable contribution to organization of museums and archives in Rostov as well as to development of the regional historical studies.

Keywords: Yacimirsky, University of Rostov, University of Warsaw, Slavic Studies, Medieval Studies, Slavic Manuscripts, Russian-Romanian Cultural Relations.