Page 43 - 6241

with the opening of academies: the first Ostrog Academy and the second Kyiv-
Mohyla Academy.
Scientific issues of the Ukrainian Renaissance largely dealt with religious
issues. A fierce champion of Orthodoxy, the richest Ukrainian tycoon Prince

Vasily-Konstantin Ostrozky gathered a truly scholarly group and invited scientists
from European universities who were Orthodox, Protestants and Catholics to
translate the Holly Bible into the Ukrainian language. Thus, in 1580 the Ostrog

Academy was founded. It In fact, that was the first higher educational institution in
the territory of Ukraine. The Academy played a very important role in the national
cultural process. It prepared a scientifically verified translation of the Holly Bible

from the Greek and Aramaic texts. In 1580-1581 it was published by Vasyl
Ostrzkyy’s printing house. This Ukrainian edition is widely known as the Ostrog
Bible, the first printed Bible of the Slavic world.

In numerous printing houses, along with liturgical and religious-polemical
literature published in Ukraine in the XVIth century, grammar bopks and
dictionaries ("Grammar of Slavic Language" by Lawrence Zizania) were published
as well. During the Ukrainian Renaissance, the foundations of Ukrainian grammar,

lexicology, and musicology were laid. A particularly important role in the
formation of scientific thought was played by a group of scientists working at the

Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra under the quidance of the Archimandrite of Yelizai
Pletenetsky, a man of high education and broad views. From this humanistic
theological atmosphere, the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy arose.
The centre of the Renaissance culture in the Ukrainian lands in the XVIth

century was Lviv. Here the traits of the new cultural era are most clearly traced.
They also manifested themselves in spiritual life, in the consciousness of the
people as a separate ethnic group with its own national idea, and in art:

architecture, painting, sculpture. Ukrainian artists from Lviv were invited to paint
not only Orthodox churches, but also Catholic churches of the Rzhechpospolyta.
This allows to identify of the Lviv Renaissance as a separate cultural phenomenon

(note that in the history of architecture this term coincides with the Renaissance
houses built in Lviv, as the ensemble of the Uspenske Brotherhood, the Boimov
Chapel, the so-called "Black Kamenica", etc.).

Democracy of the Ukrainian Renaissance culture will yield its fruits in the
culture of the Ukrainian Baroque, the first centre of which will be Kyiv, and later
Zaporizhzhya Sich.
Significant role in the socio-cultural life of Ukraine in the late XVI – first

third of the XVIIth century was played by fraternities – national-religious
organizations of the Orthodox church in Ukrainian cities. In the philosophizing of
the brothers, quite remarkable traditions still exist in Kievan Rustic Byzantinism:

42