On October 7, 2024, the faculty and students of the Department of Gagauz Philology and History honored the memory of Professor, Turkologist, and Doctor of Philological Sciences L.A. Pokrovskaya. After an extended advisory session, the participants laid flowers at the memorial plaque at the house where Lyudmila Alexandrovna stayed during her work at Komrat State University.
Brief Information about L.A. Pokrovskaya’s Activities
Lyudmila Alexandrovna Pokrovskaya was a Soviet and Russian Turkologist, Orientalist, Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor, and researcher of the Gagauz language and culture. She was born on March 18, 1925, in Leningrad, into the family of a specialist in the history of religion, who was repressed in 1936 and posthumously rehabilitated in 1955. The family (mother and 12-year-old daughter) was exiled from Leningrad to Bashkiria. After graduating from high school in 1944, Pokrovskaya, on her father’s advice, entered Leningrad University in the Turkic Department of the Oriental Faculty, having learned Bashkir and Tatar during her years in Bashkiria.
While still a student, L.A. Pokrovskaya, under the guidance of the prominent Turkologist N.K. Dmitriev, began studying the language and folklore of the Gagauz people living in southern Moldova and the Odessa region of Ukraine. After graduating from the Oriental Faculty of Leningrad University in 1949 and completing her postgraduate studies (1952), she defended her candidate dissertation "The Song Creativity of the Gagauz People" in 1953.
In 1954, L.A. Pokrovskaya worked as a junior researcher in the Department of Oriental Manuscripts of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Leningrad, and later that same year, at N.K. Dmitriev's invitation, she transferred to the Turkic Languages Section of the Institute of Linguistics of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow. There, she continued her teacher's work on significant issues of Gagauz linguistics. The field research conducted by L.A. Pokrovskaya during eight expeditions (in 1948, 1950, 1951, 1956, 1957, 1959, 1960, and 1961) to Gagauz villages in Moldova and Ukraine allowed her to formulate key points on the dialectal division, lexical composition, and the development stages of the Gagauz language, as well as its phonetic, morphological, and syntactic features.
From 1987 to 1991, L.A. Pokrovskaya consulted scholars and researchers at scientific seminars of the Academy of Sciences of the Moldavian SSR on Turkological issues and developed work plans for the newly established Department of Gagauz Studies.
From 1992 to 2000, L.A. Pokrovskaya worked as a professor in the Department of Gagauz Philology at Komrat State University. She not only lectured on the modern Gagauz language and a special course on Gagauz song folklore, but also taught a range of Turkology subjects. She assisted doctoral students and lecturers with problematic aspects of dissertation writing, course planning, and the development of special courses and seminars.
Since 1957, L.A. Pokrovskaya played an active role in creating a writing system for the Gagauz language, developing rules for orthography and punctuation, terminology, and editing the first school textbooks. She also trained specialists in the Gagauz language. In 1992, together with G.A. Gaidarji, she developed a new Gagauz alphabet based on Latin script, which was approved with minor adjustments by the People’s Assembly of Gagauzia and the Parliament of the Republic of Moldova in 1996.
Her book "Grammar of the Gagauz Language: Phonetics and Morphology" was published in Moscow in 1964. For the first time, the author managed to systematize a vast amount of linguistic material, introduce new facts into scientific circulation, and provide a linguistic explanation for the lexical, phonological, word-formation, and grammatical features of the modern Gagauz language.
In 1976, L.A. Pokrovskaya was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philological Sciences for her research "The Syntax of the Gagauz Language in a Comparative Perspective." This monograph completes the study of Gagauz grammar, analyzing the specific features of the Gagauz syntactic system that emerged under Bulgarian and broader Balkan influences. The work offers generalized conclusions based on extensive linguistic material, making it a valuable contribution to Turkological literature.
L.A. Pokrovskaya was one of the creators of the "Gagauz-Russian-Moldavian Dictionary" (Moscow, 1973). Together with the prominent Turkologist N.A. Baskakov, she led an authorial team that developed the guidelines and principles for compiling a trilingual dictionary. The publication of this dictionary marked a significant milestone in the development of written norms for the Gagauz literary language.
Among the critical issues in Gagauz studies, first raised in L.A. Pokrovskaya's scientific publications, are: the etymology of the ethnonym "Gagauz," Gagauz kinship terms, Gagauz surnames with the historical component "-oglu," Gagauz proverbs and idioms, the classification of Gagauz folk songs (türkü), the uniqueness and autonomy of the Gagauz language, and the rules for using letters in the Gagauz alphabet, including new rules for Gagauz orthography and punctuation.
L.A. Pokrovskaya made significant contributions to editing and reviewing scientific publications on Gagauz linguistics, distinguishing herself as a highly knowledgeable, objective, principled, and kind specialist.
Her work was interrupted by her passing, as she was preparing to republish two of her textbooks on the modern Gagauz language under the aegis of the Institute of Linguistic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Additionally, a collection of Gagauz folk songs and rituals, collected by L.A. Pokrovskaya during 1948–1961, was prepared for publication several years ago under the Komrat State University imprint. Of particular interest is her detailed description of a Gagauz wedding with all its rituals, recorded in 1956 in Ceadir-Lunga.
On October 24, 2009, L.A. Pokrovskaya’s ashes were interred, according to her will, in the village of Beşalma in the Autonomous Territorial Unit of Gagauzia in the Republic of Moldova. On March 18, 2015, a bust of L.A. Pokrovskaya, sculpted by A.D. Karachoban, was installed on her grave.
Lyudmila Alexandrovna Pokrovskaya lived a long, fruitful, and spiritually rich life. She left a significant legacy in the history and culture of the Gagauz people.
L.A. Pokrovskaya was an outstanding editor and reviewer of scientific publications on Gagauz linguistics. Her colleagues noted her erudition, objectivity, principled nature, and kindness. In her works, she created and presented a comprehensive system of the modern Gagauz language. Her articles, monographs, and textbooks have become essential reading for contemporary Turkologists and Gagauz scholars, reflecting her high level of professionalism and scholarly insight. L.A. Pokrovskaya’s contributions have been highly regarded in the global field of Turkology.
