HISTORY OF TRANSCARPATHIAN VILLAGES IN THE SCIENTIFIC HERITAGE OF MYKOLA LELEKACH

The investigation analyzed the articles by Associate Professor of the Uzhhorod University Mykola Lelekach on the history of such villages of Zakarpattia as Korytniany, Dravtsi, Serednie and Nevytske. The scientist prepared them while working in the Zemsky Archive in Uzhhorod. During May–August 1937, the articles were published in four issues of the Ukrainian-language magazine “Zemlia i Volia”. The published material covered the period from the 13th to the end of the 19th century, when the mentioned settlements belonged to the Uzhanskyi County. Thus, within the outlined time period, M. Lelekach focused on highlighting the issue of the first mention of each village in the sources, characterized the economy, social and national composition of the population, the performance by the peasants of certain obligations in favor of the lord or the state, the confessional affiliation of the inhabitants, their survival in the difficult realities of that controversial era, gave the dates of the construction of churches, the forming of parishes, etc. When determining the oldest reports about these villages, M. Lelekach apparently used the tax inventory of 1427. In the course of our research, it was found that some passages in M. Lelekach’s articles are of a debatable nature, for example, the contradictory information he provided about the stay of Templar monks in Serednie and the origin of the village of Nevytske. The question is whether Nevytske arose around the castle, which M. Lelekach emphasizes, or, on the contrary, that defensive structure was erected when the village already existed. Despite this, the material on the history of four villages of the Uzhhorod area presented by M. Lelekach has not lost its relevance to this day, it deserves to be reprinted, which we have done in the appendix, and therefore it can be used in the school course of local history. M. Lelekach’s publication affirms to the development in Zakarpattia in the 30s of the twentieth century of such an interdisciplinary scientific direction as historical regional studies. In the future, it would be advisable to analyze in details the works on the settlements of the region written by other researchers of the first half of the 20th century.