ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL HISTORY OF VOLYN IN THE PAGES OF JAKUB GOFMAN'S ‘VOLYN YEARBOOK’ (1930–1939)

Abstract

The article analyses publications related to the ancient and medieval history of Volyn, featured on the pages of the «Volyn Yearbook» (Rocznik Wołyński). Between 1930 and 1939, eight volumes of the magazine were published, edited by the renowned Polish local historian, ethnologist, and organizer of research on history and historical bibliography, Jakub Hoffman. The magazine was founded with the support of the Volyn District Office of the Polish Society of General School Teachers, and was primarily intended for teachers of the Volyn Voivodeship.Fourteen studies focus on the ancient and medieval history of Volyn, making up just over fifteen percent of the material published in the «Volyn Yearbook» during the 1930s. The articles address various topics, including archaeology, the history of Rus’, the Volyn-Galician state, and the status of the Volyn lands within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Separate groups of research are the analysis of documentary sources and cartography, highlighting the history of individual architectural monuments (foundations of the church over the Luha River, the Dormition Cathedral, the St. Basil Church-rotunda in Volodymyr; Franciscan monasteries in Korets and Mezhyrichy Ostrozki), the history of religious processes in the Volyn region in the Middle Ages. In particular, a review of the history of Protestantism in Volyn in the 16th–17th centuries by Alexander Kossovsky and research on the history of the Orthodox Church in Volyn between 992 and 1596 by K. Khodynytsky, in the text of which special attention is paid to the controversy surrounding the adoption of the Union of Brest, which was active among Volyn residents. The main theses of these articles, and the sources for their writing, are presented. The authors of the texts were Poles from Kraków, Warsaw, Gdansk, Lublin, Toruń, and Lviv.