Poliansky, Yurii

Poliansky, Yurii [Полянський, Юрій; Poljans'kyj, Jurij], b 6 March 1892 in Zhovtantsi, Zhovkva county, Galicia, d 19 July 1975 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Geologist and geographer; member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society from 1927 and honorary member of the Argentine Geological Society. He graduated from Lviv University in 1914. During the First World War he served in the Austrian army and then joined the Ukrainian Galician Army as an artillery officer. After the war he taught at the Academic Gymnasium of Lviv (1920–30), worked at the State Geological Institute (1927–8), and, at the same time, completed his doctoral dissertation on the morphology of Podilia (published in Zbirnyk Matematychno-pryrodopysno-likars’koï sektsiï NTSh, 1929). In the 1930s he taught anthropology at the Greek Catholic Theological Academy in Lviv. During the first Soviet and German occupation of Western Ukraine (1939–44) he taught at Lviv University and was director of the reorganized Natural Science Museum of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (currently Natural Science Museum of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine). After fleeing to Austria and Germany, where he taught at the Ukrainian Free University (1945–7), he emigrated to Argentina. There he worked as a geologist and taught geology at the state university in Buenos Aires (1956–67). In the 1920s and 1930s he published several studies of the geology and archeology of Galician Podilia, many of them in the serial publications of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. He also prepared a geological map of southern Polisia (1934) and general geological surveys of Ukraine. In Argentina he wrote several articles on the geology of Argentina.

Swiatoslaw Trofimenko

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