Vasilii Zlatarskii embodies a political-archeological nexus that pits an acceptable nationalism against imperialism when the empire under assailment is the Ottoman. Son of a Bulgarian activist, Nikola Zlartarcheto, Vasilii was sent to Petersburg for his education, and then to Berlin to train in archeology. He returned to Sophia where he helped to turn the higher school into the university in 1904, and establishing a Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in 1911. An historian, he used archeology to establish a Bulgarian identity independent of the Ottoman Muslims, returning it, as it were, to its Slavic and Byzantine heritage. During the Great War, when Bulgaria allied with the Central Powers, he joined the troops in Macedonia for purposes of excavating. Widely published and respected, he was a member of the Russian Archaeological Institute in Constantinople, the Moscow Archaeological Society, the Finno-Ugric Commonwealth in Helsingfors, a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts, the School of Slavonic Studies at the University of London, and the Seminarium Kondakovianum in Prague. He also received an honorary degree in Slavic Philology from Kharkov University in 1907.
Social Estate: popovich
A professor of Slavic philology at New Russia University, Poruzhenko specialized in Bulgaria; emigrating there during the Civil War, he taught Russian literature at the University of Sophia and was active in emigre circles. He had served as secretary of the Odessa Society, 1890-192.il War
Minister of Education Sergei Uvarov invited the Leipzig-educated Stefani to head the department of classical philology at Dorpat University in 1846. Trained in Greek epigraphy, Stefani moved to St. Petersburg four years later, to the Hermitage, where he studied artefacts sent from the Black Sea littoral. His methodology of not interpreting beyond what was in his hand influenced his students to be scrupulous and careful about what claims they could make.
Ignatii Stelletskii, after graduating from the Kiev Spiritual Academy, took a position at the Nazareth teaching seminary in Palestine. From here he made an unconventional jump to the Moscow Archive of the Ministry of Justice, where Samokvasov took him under his mentorship in excavating kurgans. Stelletskii combined the two with a paper on “The Scythian Invasion of Palestine,” read at the 14th Congress. Indeed, Palestine provided his main area of expertise, though he does not appear to have returned. He presented an equally controversial paper at the 15th Congress, on his latest interest, searches for the city’s “underground,” searches that he continued in other cities. During the Great War he found himself on the Caucasian front, from which Marr and Uspenskii and others were conducting excavations; he was appointed director of the archeological department of the governor-generalship of the occupied Ottoman territories. On a side note, Stelletskii became obsessed with the “missing” library of Ivan the Terrible, which he carried over into his Soviet years.
Although his daughter Marina is far better known to posterity than he, Ivan Vladimirovich probably inspired some of her Silver-Age poetic sensibilities with his interest in philology and antiquities. The family lived for several years in Italy, where Ivan studied Latin epigraphy. He was instrumental in the building of the Museum of Fine Arts named for Alexander III (renamed now for Alexander Pushkin), and served as its first director when it opened in 1912. At his inspiration, the museum included artefacts from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages. His brother Dmitrii was deeply involved with the culture of medieval Rus’ at the Moscow Archeological Institute and the Archive of the Ministry of Justice.
The oldest of four brothers, all of whom had tangential associations with archeology, Fedor was a Byzantinist, best known as the director of the Russian Archeological Institute in Constantinople, which opened in 1894. Uspenskii was particularly interested in studying the Slavic lands of the Ottoman Empire via the Institute, especially their Orthodox artefacts. Although the guns of August, 1914, forced the closure of the Institute, Uspenskii took his archeological ambitions to the Russian Army on the Caucasian front, where it was enjoying success against the Turkish forces. Planning for a Russian victory, he dreamed of a Russian liturgy being prayed in the Hagia Sophia.
Pomialovskii became one of the heavyweights, who began his training in classical languages, primarily Latin, and ended up serving on many educational committees and a member of every number of Archeological committees, including American ones.
Very little is known about this Rumiantsev, which suggests that he was not related to the noble branch who established the museum in their name. His primary focus was on various aspects of medieval Muscovy, including Rostov as well as Moscow; his most valued work in archeology seems to have been as the longtime secretary of the IMAO. He was one who considered archives central to the discipline, and he received the Uvarov Prize for work on the early Synodal typography.
Unlike his brother Nikolai, who directed his attention to the specific topic of church architecture, Fedor turned his to a region, Vilna. He taught there, worked in digs there, and involved himself with the Archeological Museum, writing a guide to it. In addition to drafting an archeological map of Vilna Province, he made one also of Grodno Province.
Nikolai Pokrovskii pioneered in church architecture as a field in archeology. His Master’s on “The Origin of the Ancient Christian Basilica” established the basis for what would become a major archeological question, that is, how did church art and architecutre relate to liturgy. His interest in Orthodoxy meant that he also became a Byzantinist. Moreover, he was a founding member of the monarchist political party “The Russian Assembly” in 1900.