Mykola Arkas

Mykola Mykolayovych Arkas (; – 1909) was a Ukrainian composer, writer, historian, and cultural activist of Greek ancestry. In 1908, Arkas wrote History of Ukraine, first popular history of Ukraine published in Ukrainian. His most notable musical composition was the opera .

Biography Background, family and education

Mykola Mykolayovych Arkas was born on , in Mykolaiv in the Russian Empire (now in Ukraine). His grandfather Andreas Arkas, the son of an Orthodox priest from the Greek city of Patras, was invited to teach classical languages and history at the Nikolayev Naval School in Saint Petersburg. He published the dictionaries for 12 languages, all of which he spoke. He moved with his family to Russia with the help of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.

Mykola Arkas was a son of the Russian admiral Nikolay Andreyevich Arkas, who was the Commander of the Black Sea Fleet, a founder of steam navigation and trade on the Black Sea and a founder of Caspian Sea Fleet, (1816–1881) and the Ukrainian Sophia Bogdanovich.

Mykola received his all-round education in the Law School of St. Petersburg and completed his studies in physics and mathematics at the University of Odessa.

Naval career and later life After completing his studies (1875–1881), in accordance with the family tradition, he joined the Imperial Russian Navy, where from 1875 to 1899 he worked in the Naval Office in Mykolaiv .

(1890) Arkas's opera (1890) is the most significant work of Mykola Arkas, adapted as from Taras Shevchenko's poem of the same title. The opera was first performed in Moscow in 1899 by the Ukrainian composer and theatre director Marko Kropyvnytskyi. The piano–vocal score was first published in 1897. The work brought recognition to Mykola Arkas and became the first Ukrainian lyrical folk opera. Performances of "Kateryna" were a great success, first playing in Moscow by Mark Kropivnitskiy's troupe in 1899, and later in Minsk, Vilnius and Kiev.

Commemoration In October 1992, in Mykolaiv, there was open a monument to Mykola Arkas (by sculptor O.Zdykhovskiy). In 2003, a postage stamp was released in Ukraine dedicated to Mykola Arkas.

A biography about Arkas was written by the Ukrainian folklorist Leonid Sergeevič Kaufman in 1958.