Safonovych, Teodosii

Safonovych, Teodosii or Sofonovych, Feodosii [Сафонович, Теодосій or Софонович, Феодосій; Safonovyč, Teodosij or Sofonovyč, Feodosij], b ?, d 1676 in Kyiv. Writer, church leader, and one of the first systematic Ukrainian historians. He studied at the Kyivan Mohyla College and then taught there (1650–5) and served as its acting director (1653–5). From 1655 he was hegumen of Saint Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery. His history of Ukraine, Kroinika z litopistsov starodavnikh ... (Chronicle from Ancient Chroniclers ..., 1672), introduced the idea of the unity of all Ukrainian lands and set out the course by which the Cossack estate gained supremacy in Ukraine. Only a few manuscript copies of it have survived.

In the first part of the Kroinika, concerning history up to the end of the 13th century, Safonovych reworks the Hypatian Chronicle, and in the second part he presents a collection of accounts based mainly on Polish chroniclers, especially Maciej Stryjkowski. The work was often used by Ukrainian chroniclers of the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly by the author of Sinopsis (probably Innokentii Gizel). A detailed summary of the Kroinika was published by Evgenii Bolkhovitinov in his historical dictionary of clerical writers (vol 2, 1827). An edition of the Kroinika begun before the First World War by Stepan Golubev for the Kyiv Archeographic Commission was not completed. An original manuscript of the Kroinika is preserved in the Västeraser Gymnasialbibliothek in Sweden, a copy of which was given to the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR in the 1960s; another manuscript is held by the Central State Archive in Moscow.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Borelius, Cecilia. Safonovičs Chronik im Codex ad 10 der Västeraser Gymnasialbibliothek, eine sprachliche Untersuchung (Uppsala 1952)

Arkadii Zhukovsky

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]