Turning the pages back... February 18, 1855 (02/16/97)

Turning the pages back...

February 18, 1855

Lev Symyrenko, the grandson of one of Ukraine's first industrialists, was born on February 18, 1855, on an estate near Mliyiv, about 40 miles west of Cherkasy. His grandfather Fedir's factory produced the first steamships used on the Dnipro River, and built the first mechanized sugar refinery in the Russian Empire.

His father, Platon, established an orchard on their estate, which helped put his son into the Ukrainian history books, but not before a rocky youth.

In 1879, the year he graduated from Odesa University, Lev Symyrenko was arrested for political activity and exiled to eastern Siberia for eight years. While in Krasnoiarsk, his green thumb left its mark - he established a civic park, organized greenhouses and planted decorative and fruit-bearing trees.

Upon his return to Mliyiv in 1887, Symyrenko developed his father's legacy into one of the largest collections of fruit trees in Europe. The orchard included 900 varieties of apples, 889 kinds of pears, 350 sorts of cherries, 84 kinds of plums, 54 strains of walnut, 36 forms of apricot trees and 15 types of pear trees.

Symyrenko established an orcharding school and worked on a monograph on pomology (the science of fruit trees). On January 6, 1920, while war communism was at its peak, he was assassinated on his estate, and the property was nationalized.

In 1921, his son Volodymyr founded the Mliyiv Orcharding Research Station (MORS) and served as its director. He was arrested in 1933 after running afoul of Lysenko-ites. Released briefly in 1937, he was re-apprehended a short time later and died while incarcerated, although the exact circumstances are unknown.

Nevertheless, over the years, the MORS produced hundreds of thousands of seedlings for fruit farms throughout the USSR, and its researchers developed new strains of gooseberry, currant and raspberry bushes, and new varieties of apple, cherry and pear trees.

Sources: "Mliiv Orcharding Station," Vol. 4, and the "Symyrenko, Fedir, Lev, Platon, Volodymyr" entries in Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 5 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

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