Sabbatical trip to Europe – Part 1 (Lviv, Ukraine)

Since about 2018, I was interested in the work of Julian Hirniak, who published an article on periodic chemical systems in 1908 (and a follow-up in 1911), before Alfred Lotka’s famous theoretical 1910 paper and William Bray’s experimental work in 1921.
The article had been published in a journal of the Shevchenko Society in Lviv (Austria-Hungarian empire at that time) in, as I read everywhere, in Ruthenian language. All those years, I could not get a scan of the article, or the journal, not even from the Shevchenko Society archive in New York City.
In January, I contacted a physicist at the Ukrainian National Academy of Science, who recently published about the Shevchenko Society and asked him about Julian Hirniak and the journal. He immediately responded and shortly after, he sent me pictures of the article in question. He translated that article into English, I translated Hirniak’s German 1911 article into English and, together with another co-author, we submitted a manuscript in June.
When I mentioned that I will be in Europe this summer, he invited me to visit him in Lviv, Ukraine. It became the first trip during my nearly 6-week time in Europe.

Impression of Lviv, located close to the Polish border in Western Ukraine: surreal!
Despite the war in the Eastern/Southern part of the country, life is going on. Electricity outages are compensated by power generators outside every shop/restaurant. On Saturday evening, we saw Mozart’s Don Giovanni in Lviv’s Opera Theater.

We also visited the archive of the Shevchenko society – on a Saturday morning. The director Kostiantyn Kurylyshyn (Head of the Department at the Vasyl Stefanyk National Scientific Library of Ukraine in Lviv) invited us because he is, as he said, nevertheless there and could show us around. Finally, I visited the place, build in 1912, where ‘every’ Ukrainian publication can be found. This is similar to the Library of Congress in Washington DC. And I could finally see the original 1908 publication – and take my own picture.