15 January 2025
January 15 — In 1871, Ahatanhel Krymskyi, a Ukrainian Historian of Crimean Tatar Descent, Was Born
On January 15, 1871, Ahatanhel Krymskyi, an orientalist, translator proficient in more than 60 languages, historian, and one of the founding members of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 1918, was born in the city of Volodymyr.
His family traces its roots to the Crimean Peninsula. According to historical accounts, one of his ancestors fled from Bakhchysarai in 1696, escaping the unjust wrath of a local ruler. He found refuge in Lithuania, converted to Christianity, and, as a native of Crimea, adopted the surname Krymskyi.
Ahatanhel Krymskyi became one of the world’s most prominent linguists and experts on the history and culture of the East. By the age of 18, he was fluent in eight languages, and by the end of his life, he had mastered over 60 (different researchers cite numbers ranging from 56 to 100, noting that he studied not only languages but also various dialects). The scholar himself joked that it would be easier to find a language he didn’t know than to count the ones he did.
During the formation of the Ukrainian State in 1918, Krymskyi held the position of academic secretary at the newly established Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He also headed the department of Arabic and Iranian philology as well as the historical-philological division. Under his leadership, orthographic and dialectological commissions were established and operated.
During the Soviet occupation in 1919, the very existence of the Academy was under threat, and it was through Ahatanhel Krymskyi’s relentless efforts that its destruction was averted. During this period, he lectured at Kyiv University, where he established an entire school of Oriental studies in Ukrainian scholarship. He authored numerous works proving the strong connection between the culture and languages of the Middle East and Ukraine. In 1921, Krymskyi was appointed director of the Institute of the Ukrainian Scientific Language.
In 1941, the professor was arrested as an “ideologue of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism who had led a nationalist underground for years” and, along with other members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, was deported to Kazakhstan. The subsequent fate of Ahatanhel Krymskyi remains unknown. According to official records, he died on January 25, 1942, in a prison hospital in Kostanai. However, the exact location of this prominent scholar’s grave has yet to be discovered.
Throughout his life, he conducted groundbreaking research in Arabic studies, Iranian studies, Semitic studies, Turkology, and Slavic studies. Krymskyi authored over 1,000 scholarly works on the history of languages, literature, art, and religion of the peoples of the Near and Middle East, as well as the Caucasus and Europe.Under his leadership, numerous dictionaries and academic works were prepared and published, many of which remain foundational resources for translators to this day. In addition to his academic work, Krymskyi published three collections of poetry and authored one of the first intellectual novels in Ukrainian literature—Andrii Lahovskyi.