PROFESSOR EMERITUS DMITRI OBOLENSKY
Professor Dmitri Obolensky, born in 1918, Petrograd, left this world December 23, 2001, Burford, Oxfordshire.
Dmitriy Dmitrievich Obolensky (Dimitri Obolensky), historian: born Petrograd 1 April 1918 (Old Style 19 March 1918); Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge 1942-48, Honorary Fellow 1991-2001; Lecturer in Slavonic Studies, Cambridge University 1946-48; Reader in Russian and Balkan Medieval History, Oxford University 1949-61, Professor of Russian and Balkan History 1961-85 (Emeritus); Student, Christ Church, Oxford 1950-85 (Emeritus); FBA 1974; died Burford, Oxfordshire 23 December 2001.
A lay delegate to the Moscow Millennial Church
Council of 1988. Vice-president of the British Academy from 1983 to
1985. Knighted in 1984.
Doctor Honoris Causa of the Univeristy of Sofia 'St. Clement of Ohrid', 1989
Basic works:
We express our deep sympathy to the family of Professor Obolensky and we say that his mastery and his good will be kept in the memory of the Bulgarian scientific community.
In the Preface of the "Bogomils" he reveals three important approaches to the Bogomil's and Dualistic matter, that are actual also today:
| - the fact that Bulgaria is the birthplace
of Heresia Bulgarorum, that means Bogomilsm:
p.viii Bogomil studies received a fresh impetus and a new orientation in the second half of the nineteenth century, owing to discovery of Slavonic documents which conclusively pointed to Bulgaria as the original home of the Bogomil sect. |
| - to understand the Bulgarian heresy as a very important
way of the communication between civilizations, cultures, between East
and West Europe:
p.vii The Bogomil movement has come to be recognized as one of the major problems of south Slavonic and Byzantine history. The influence it has exercised on the history of the Balkan peoples—on their church and state, on their society and literature, on their religion and folk-lore—make the study of Bogomilism essential for Byzantinist and Slavist alike. To scholars and students in other fields Bogomilism still ofers many unexplored, or half-explored, possibilities. The theologian and the philosopher can find in Bogomilism one of the most interesting examples of the growth on European soil in the Middle Ages of a pattern of thought and a way of life which may be termed 'dualistic'. A detailed study of Bogomilism should help Western medievalists to shed new light on the still somewhat obscure problem of the historical connections between Asiatic Manichaeism and the dualistic movements of western Europe, particularly of the Italian Patarenes and of the Cathars or Albigenses of southern France. This connection, if successfully established, would in its turn enable Church historians to regard the Bogomil sect as the first European link in the thousand-year-long chain leading from Mani's teaching in Mesopotamia in the third century to the Albigensian Crusade in southern France in the thirteenth. Moreover, the study of the Bogomil movement has its own, and by no means negligible, part to play in the investigation of the cultural and religious links between eastern and western Europe, the importance of which is increasingly perceived at the present time. |
| -to know that Bogomilism was in inner evolution:
p.IX In this manner a clearer picture may perhaps be obtained of the gradual evolution of the doctrines, ethics, ritual, customs and organization of the sect under the influence of historical circumstances. |