An archpriest (протоиерей), that is, a member of the white clergy, Gorskii was a professor of dogmatic theology at the Moscow Spiritual Academy and an erudite scholar in the history and archeology of the Russian church, as well as of biblical archeology. He was also a member of the Iaroslavl Natural History Society.
Theme: Christian East
One of the founding members of IMAO, Filimonov enjoyed the leisure of his noble background to educate himself in many aspects of archeology. In 1867 he was sent to Paris to manage the display of Russian antiquities at the International Exposition, and he also worked on the Ethnographic Exhibition in Moscow in 1879. A curator at both Moscow’s Armoury and the Rumiantsev Museum, the Imperial Society of Lovers of Natural Sciences, Anthropology,and Ethnography dispatched him to both Crimea and then the Caucasus to oversee excavations.
Born with the surname Kapustin, Antonin was in 1850 appointed abbot embassy church in Athens, where when supervising excavations under the church, he discovered not only the ruins of an earlier church, and an even older Roman bath. From there he went to Constantinople and then Jerusalem in the same capacity. In Palestine, he activated the past in a new way, acquiring the Oak of Mamre, where Abraham had entertained three angels, and built a hostel nearby for Russian pilgrims.Many of his publications explored his travels in these Holy Lands.
One ot the first ethnic Georgian archeologists and educated in the Moscow Spiritual Academy, Bakradze combined Georgia’s Christianity with its history and ethnography and wrote widely on all three. He contributed to the Tiflis Museum of Zion Cathedral, and he worked for hte post-emancipation Commission to resolve the social estate-land question.
A graduate of St. Vladimir University in 1886, Pavlutskii had studied classical philology under Ia. A. Kulakovskii, and then continued his education in Berlin and Paris. One of the most influential scholars of religious architecture, he focused on the reciprical influences of Greek, Byzantine, Italian, and Russian churches, especially the latter around Kiev. Keeping art in archeology, he influenced a generation of young scholars.
The extraordinarily prolific Ainalov taught at several universities, noteworthy as an art historian, whose expertise lay in many forms of religious art, from Italian mosaics to Kiev’s St. Sophia.