«I Want to Devote My Free Time to Ethnography”: Aryvon (Ilarion) Kurylo-Krymchak as an Ethnographer

The article is devoted to highlighting a hitherto unknown page in the biography of an extraordinary person – Ilarion Pavlovych Kurylo-Krymchak, the organizer of local history (primarily environmental) research in the Ukrainian the Sea of Azov region (Melitopolshchyna), director of the Melitopol district local history museum, as well as an underground member and one of the leaders of the Melitopol district OUN branch, burgomaster of the city of Melitopol in 1941–1943. While teaching and, at the same time, acting as an active contributor to the Ethnographic Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, I. Kurylo-Krymchak has sent ethnographic materials from the Ukrainian villages of Novo-Oleksandrivka and Voznesenka in the Melitopol district during 1926–1931. The information collected by I. Kurylo-Krymchak makes it possible to reconstruct certain elements of the traditional spiritual culture of Ukrainians of the Melitopol region. They concern, in particular, separate elements of the calendar ritual of the winter cycle; folk beliefs associated with traditional ideas about water, the cat, as well as song folklore. I. Kurylo-Krymchak has collected ethnographic materials according to specially developed programs of the Ethnographic Commission, which significantly increases their scientific value as empirical data for subsequent scientific generalizations. Having a high authority as a teacher, I. Kurylo-Krymchak has not оnly recorded empirical material himself, but also involved rural youth in this work, uniting them around the local history circle. The political repressions that swept across Ukraine in the 1930s affected I. Kurylo-Krymchak directly, since in 1930 he has been removed from the post of head of the Melitopol District Local History Museum, but he is reinstated later. The stigma of ”bourgeois science”, which weighed on ethnography in those years, forced I. Kurylo-Krymchak to curtail his work in this direction and focus on museum, teaching and environmental protection activities. The ethnographic heritage of I. Kurylo-Krymchak is introduced into scientific circulation for the first time.