Maria Viazmitina and her Archive

Maria Viazmitina (1896–1994) was a Ukrainian archaeologist, art historian, and scholar of the East, and held a Candidate of Historical Sciences degree. Since 1948, she worked at the Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, where she focused on Scythian art, and later on the archaeology of the Sarmatians and Late Scythians. She laid a strong foundation for Sarmatian studies in Ukraine. She published a number of major syntheses in the foundational volumes Archaeology of the Ukrainian SSR (1971; 1986) and History of the Ukrainian SSR (1977; 1981), as well as two monographs dedicated to the Late Scythian settlement and necropolis of Zolota Balka (1962; 1972).

She began her scholarly career as a scholar of the East. While a postgraduate researcher at the Khanenko Museum, she published a catalogue of the museum’s Islamic collection in 1930, following her earlier catalogue of Islamic holdings at the Kharkiv Museum of Art and History in 1928. She defended a promotion thesis - equivalent to a Candidate of Sciences dissertation - on the topic "Muslim Inlaid Bronze Vessels from the Period of Flourishing" (1929). Following the successful defense, she became Head of the Eastern Art Department at the Khanenko Museum. She also established a separate Department of Eastern Art at the Kharkiv Museum of Art and History. Alongside her museum work, in 1930–1931 she taught at the Kyiv Art Institute, where she delivered a course of lectures on the history of Near Eastern art.

In 1934, following the crackdown on Eastern studies in the Ukrainian SSR and the intensification of pressure and repression by the Soviet authorities, she was dismissed from the Khanenko Museum and unofficially banned from engaging in scholarly work. In 1937, she began training as an archaeologist by participating in the Termiz Archaeological Complex Expedition (TAKE) in Uzbekistan, led by Mikhail Masson. As a unit leader, she conducted excavations at the site of Airtam in ancient Bactria, dating to the Kushan period. Her PhD dissertation, defended in 1947, was titled Monuments of Kushan Art at Airtam and was based on her fieldwork.

During the German occupation of Kyiv, she remained in the city, working with the collections of closed libraries housed in Taras Shevchenko University. Between 1943 and 1944, she headed the library of the Union of Soviet Architects in Kyiv. In 1944, she founded the Scientific Library of the Academy of Architecture of the Ukrainian SSR (today the V. Zabolotnyi State Scientific Library of Architecture and Construction), which she led until 1948.

In 1946, while still working in the library, she joined the South Turkmenistan Archaeological Complex Expedition (YuTAKE), also led by Mikhail Masson. For four field seasons (until 1949), she conducted excavations of the necropolis of the Parthian nobility at the site of New Nisa. This website is dedicated to this chapter of her scientific biography and features the digitized portion of her archive - the “Nisa Collection” (Inventory / Opys No. 4) - as well as the monograph Maria Viazmitina: An Archaeological Expedition to Parthia (With Selected Letters and an Unpublished Article) by Oleksandra Buzko (2025).

Oleksandra Buzko

Halyna Stanytsina recalls that sometime in the 1990s, the administration of the Institute of Archaeology instructed younger colleagues to visit and congratulate the veterans - former female staff members of the Institute - on the occasion of March 8th. The young archaeologists were given addresses, greeting cards, and five rubles each to buy flowers. Among those who went to visit Maria Viazmitina was Halyna Stanytsina (then an archivist, later Head of the Scientific Archive). She recalls visiting Maria Ivanivna at 25 Sofiivska Street, in her apartment near the Saint Sophia Cathedral. It was a communal apartment that had belonged, before the revolution, to the family of Liubov Danylivna Viazmitina - the wife of Mykhailo Viazmitin (Maria's brother). During Soviet times, Maria Viazmitina had one room there, and her friend Maria Novytska had another. Halyna Stanytsina remembers that Maria Viazmitina would sometimes take a small chair outside and sit near the building. The room itself was modestly furnished: a bed, a bookcase, and a small round table. Paintings hung on the walls, including a portrait of her godmother Maria Ignatieva. After the scholar’s death in 1994, the portrait was given to the Ignatiev family.

In her nineties, Maria Ivanivna was systematically organizing her archive and gradually transferring it to the Institute of Archaeology. Halyna Stanytsina would bring her archival folders, and Viazmitina would return them filled and pre-labeled. The scholar recalled that this was the fourth archive she had deposited at various institutions. Presumably, she meant the archives of her friend Maria Novytska, her father, academician Oleksa Novytsky, and also of Yevheniia Spaska, who was exiled by the Soviet authorities to Kazakhstan in 1934. At that time, the Institute of Archaeology was housed in the Vydubychi Monastery. Thus, in the 1990s, Maria Viazmitina’s archive found its way there. After her death in 1994, the archive’s head, Zhanna Kononenko, together with Halyna Stanytsina, retrieved the rest of the folders using the Institute’s bus. In total, the archive includes over a hundred folders and several boxes. It is currently undergoing scholarly and technical processing: Inventory / Opys No. 4, the “Nisa Collection,” has been compiled, and around five thousand letters have been sorted by date and recipient. The scholar’s library was transferred as a separate collection to the Scientific Library of the Institute of Archaeology.

Oleksandra Buzko, Halyna Stanytsina

Maria Viazmitina’s student and first biographer was Valentyna Korpusova. She served as the scholar’s personal assistant and often met with her at home. In 1963, she participated in Maria Viazmitina’s final expedition in the Kherson region, working on the excavation of the Late Scythian necropolis of Zolota Balka.
We invite readers to explore one of her articles dedicated to Maria Viazmitina.

Published in:
Korpusova, V. 2017. Try intelektualni shliakhy M. I. Viazmitinoi. Mystetstvo islamu v muzeiakh Ukrainy: zbirnyk materialiv naukovoho seminaru na chest 120-richnoho yuvileiu Marii Viazmitinoi (1896-1994). 25–26 kvitnia 2016 r., Natsionalnyi muzei mystetstv imeni Bohdana ta Varvary Khanenkiv. Kyiv: Feniks, p. 24-25.