Fedir Vovk

Who was Fedir Vovk?

Fedir Kindratovych Vovk was a Ukrainian anthropologist-archaeologist, the curator of the Alexander III Museum in St. Petersburg.

Vovk graduated from Kiev University in 1871. From 1887 to 1905 he lived in Paris to escape tsarist persecution; he earned a Ph.D. in 1900, and won the Godard Prize for his dissertation. In 1905 he returned to Russia, where, along with his position at the Alexander III Museum, he held a lecturership at Saint Petersburg University. He was granted a professorship at Kiev University in 1917 but died before he could take it up.

Vovk's research concerned the anthropological study of the Ukrainian people; in it he argued that the Ukrainians constituted a separate group of Slavs most closely related to the Southern Slavs.