Given the recent move to bring our colleagues in the Department of World Collections in as blog partners, I thought it would be nice to look this week at a couple of books looking at historical Ukrainian diplomatic and trade links in areas covered by that department’s Near and Middle Eastern section.

Osmansʹko-ukraïnsʹka dyplomatii︠a︡ v dokumentakh XVII-XVIII st. (Ottoman-Ukrainian diplomacy in documents of the 17th-18th centuries; published 2018) by Oleksandr Sereda contains original source material showing the relationship between the Ukrainian Hetmanate and the Ottoman Empire.  The sources are largely Ottoman and are provided in their original Turkish and then in Ukrainian translation.  (As it happens, I found the record mistakenly listed Turkmen instead of Turkish – my correction will show up later tomorrow in iDiscover)

Skhidna torhivli︠a︡ Lʹvova v seredyni XVI–pershiĭ polovyni XVII st. : zbirnyk dokumentiv (L’viv’s Eastern trade from the middle of the 16th century to the first half of the 17th century : a collection of documents; published 2011).  The Ottoman Empire features heavily here too, but not exclusively, and this time the sources are originally in Polish, Latin, or Ukrainian.  The index section put together by Volodymyr Kryvonos, the volume’s editor, is amazingly detailed and mammoth, stretching from page 479 to page 542.  It starts with geographical and personal name indexes, then takes in subjects such as ethnicity of merchant (Armenian is the largest identified group), document type, product type, mode of transport, and much more.

Ukraine and Armenia have had particularly close ties over the centuries, and we’ll look at books related to that relationship in due course.

Mel Bach