Vladislav Yakimovich Grosul and his Concept of the Ethnogenesis of Moldavians

Abstract

Almost all researchers representing various humanitarian disciplines are distinguished by an integrated approach at the present stage of development of scientific knowledge on the study of the ethnogenesis of Moldavians. One of these scientists is the outstanding historian Vladislav Yakimovich Grosul. As a representative of historical and political Moldavism, in the late 1990s he gave impetus to the revival of interest in the migrationist concept in fundamental science. Vladislav Yakimovich repeatedly drew attention to the fact that not only Romanian, but also Soviet scientists for a long time, in essence, adhered to autochthonous and admigration theories. According to his own confessions, he shared this position, and he himself, however, later decided to reconsider it and actively urged his colleagues to do so. Relying mainly on the works of linguists, archaeologists and anthropologists, he believed that the Romanized population of the Balkan Peninsula were primarily Romanized Illyrians, and not Daco-Thracians, and that the proto-language of the Eastern Romance was also formed in the Balkans. V. Ya. Grosul, admitting the possibility (albeit insignificant) that a small part of the Romanized population could have survived in the Carpathians, has developed the Illyrian version of the migration theory most fully and convincingly so far. The concept of V. Ya. Grosul requires the closest possible attention, critical analysis, especially on the basis of an integrated historical and geographical approach.