Yuriy Venelin

Yuriy Ivanovich Venelin (; born Georgiy Hutsa; 22 September 1802 – 26 March 1839) was a Rusyn slavist, folklorist, ethnographer and philologist best known for his research on the language, history and culture of Bulgaria and its people.

Biography Venelin was born in the village of Velka Tibava in Transcarpathia, Habsburg Empire (the present day village of Tybava in Mukachevo Raion of Zakarpattia Oblast of Ukraine). He enrolled in Lviv University and later moved to Chişinău, where he examined the language and history of Bulgarian expatriates. Venelin studied medicine at the Imperial Moscow University, but his interest in Bulgarian culture continued.

In 1830, he was envoyed to the Ottoman-ruled Bulgarian lands by the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences. He visited Bulgarian cities such as Varna, Kavarna and Silistra, recording folk songs and sayings and gaining a firsthand knowledge of the Bulgarian language. In 1836, he made the acquaintance of Odesa-based Bulgarian émigré Vasil Aprilov, with whom he kept up an active correspondence.

He died in Moscow in 1839. The work has been credited for popularizing the Bulgarian culture and history in the Russian Empire and influencing the national feelings of many Bulgarian émigrés. This was a groundbreaking discovery in paleoslavistics, as it established Bulgarian as one of the oldest Slavic languages and demonstrated the crucial role that Bulgarian played in the development of Slavic culture and literature. Therefore Venelin, along with Vostokov, stands at the origins of that point of view, which soon became and still is dominant in worldwide Slavic studies.