Ukraine Maps Arrive at Harvard

The family of a prominent Ukrainian icon has donated to Harvard a collection of almost 900 maps thought to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, the University announced this week.

Bohdan Krawciw, who died in 1975, was an activist for Ukrainian independence, as well as a poet, translator, journalist, and to top it all off, a collector of maps of Ukraine.

Marika L. Whaley, the publications manager at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI), described the collection as “monumental.”

“I don’t know how this guy had the spare time to collect all these maps,” she said.

Krawciw had a long relationship with Harvard. He was “present at the creation” of HURI in 1973 and served as a research associate there, according to Steven Seegel, a Shklar postdoctoral research fellow at HURI.

It’s not the first time that Krawciw’s family has donated maps to the University—in 1978, they bequeathed 12,000 maps to Harvard.

Seegel said the maps in Krawciw’s latest collection are written in nine different languages, show remarkable quality, and document vital historical changes that have made ripples in both art and history circles.

The collection includes more than 20 maps by the 17th century French military engineer and cartographer Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan, whose works were used as “authoritative” depictions of Ukrainian borderlands for at least 150 years, Seegel wrote in an e-mail. Krawciw’s collection also boasts rare maps of Crimean War battle plans and propaganda maps.

“One of Krawciw’s rules of thumb—which he seemed to have violated occasionally—was that he never wanted to spend more than $50 on a single map acquisition,” Seegel said.

Now, though, the collection is thought to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. according to Lubomyr Hajda, the associate director of HURI.