Dmytro Yavornytskyi

Biography

Dmytro Ivanovych Yavornytskyi (Evarnytskyi) was born on November 6, 1855, in the village of Sontsivka (now Borysivka) in the Kharkiv region. He was a Ukrainian historian, archaeologist, ethnographer, folklorist, lexicographer, and writer, and the most famous researcher of the history of the Ukrainian Cossacks. He was a full member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society (1914) and the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (1929). Author of over 1500 scientific works.

He was one of the founders of the A.M. Pol Regional Museum in Katerynoslav (now the D.I. Yavornytskyi Dnipro National Historical Museum), an institution he headed in 1902-1933. He died on August 5, 1940, in Dnipropetrovs’k.

Contribution to Petrykivka Painting Research

It was Dmytro Yavornytskyi who initiated the systematic study of Petrykivka wall paintings. In 1911-1913, he commissioned the St. Petersburg artist Yevheniia Evenbach to make watercolor sketches of wall paintings in the houses of Petrykivka and neighboring villages. These works became the first scientific record of Petrykivka art, as no older documented examples have survived. Subsequently, Yavornytskyi’s collection formed the basis of the museum’s collection of Petrykivka paintings, which is now on display at the Dnipro National History Museum.

In 1924, Yavornytskyi organized an ethnographic expedition along the Dnipro River, which was attended by a young researcher Yevheniia Berchenko, the author of the first fundamental work on wall painting in the Dnipro region (1930).

Thanks to Yavornytskyi’s initiative, Petrykivka painting was not only documented but also entered into scientific circulation as a unique phenomenon of Ukrainian folk culture.