Turning the pages back...

March 17, 1847

Fedir Vovk was Ukraine's greatest anthropologist-archaeologist, and the abortive "Treasures of Ukraine" exhibit that was to have toured museums in Canada this year, as well as the Cro-Magnon exhibit at the Museum of Natural History in New York City, owe much to his research.

Fedir Vovk was born on March 17, 1847, in Kriachkivtsi, near Pyriatyn, about 140 kilometers southeast of Kyiv.

A graduate of the Nizhen gymnasium as well as the universities of Odessa and Kyiv (1871), he became active in the Kyiv Hromada, and founded the southwestern (Ukrainian) branch of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society.

In the late 1870s, Vovk did archaeological research in the Kyiv Gubernia and Volhynia, then fled abroad to escape tsarist persecution. From 1887 he studied anthropology, comparative ethnography and archaeology in Paris, where his doctoral dissertation on primate and human skeletal variations in feet was awarded the Godard Prize (1890).

In 1899 he was made a full member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. In 1904-1906 he participated, along with the society's luminaries Ivan Franko, Ivan Rakovsky, Zenon Kuzelia and Lev Hankevych, in a series of anthropological and ethnographic expeditions in (Austrian-controlled) Bukovyna and Transcarpathia.

Over the course of his career, Vovk amassed a vast collection of materials and data from various regions of Ukraine, on which he laid the foundation for the chairs of geography and anthropology at St. Petersburg University.

After the Revolution of 1905 eased the intensity of Russian autocracy somewhat, he traveled to the imperial capital to become a custodian of the Ethnographic Museum there and lecture at the university. In 1907 he was given full membership in the Ukrainian Scientific Society.

As another revolution broke the Russian monarchy's back in 1917, Vovk was appointed professor at Kyiv University while abroad. He never made it, dying en route in Zhlobin (near Homel) in Belarus, on June 30, 1918.

Source: "Vovk, Fedir," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 5 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, March 17, 1996, No. 11, Vol. LXIV

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