Bohdan Koval’ papers

Bohdan Koval was a historian by training, educator, public figure, prominent participant in the Hetman movement, and patron of cultural and scholarly initiatives. He was born on September 3, 1911, in the village of Synevids'ko Vyzhnie, Stryi County, Galicia. He died on September 21, 2000, in Stamford, Connecticut, and was buried at Holy Spirit Cemetery in Hamptonburgh, New York. Koval studied history at the University of Lviv. In 1942, he defended his doctoral dissertation on the pedagogical foundations of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy at the Ukrainian Free University in Prague. He subsequently taught at a teachers' college in Lviv. During the Second World War, he worked in Germany, assisting Ukrainian forced laborers who had been deported there. He collaborated closely with leaders of the Hetman movement and served as a member of the Presidium of the Hetman Council. After the war, while in Germany, he was commandant of the displaced persons (DP) camp in Burgdorf, near Hanover. In 1949, Koval immigrated to the United States, where he continued to hold various positions within the Ukrainian Hetman Organization of America. He contributed regularly to the newspaper Batkivshchyna (Toronto) and collaborated with the Bulava Publishing House in New York. The publishing house issued his collection of essays, Ideas and People (Idei i liudy), in 1968. Earlier, while still in Galicia, he had published a collection of short stories entitled Cruel Happiness (Zhorstoke shchastia) in 1939. Koval was a co-founder of the V. Lypynsky East European Research Institute in Philadelphia and a co-founder and collective chair of the Stryi Region Committee. He also helped organize the Mohyla Academic Society in the United States, served on the Supervisory Board of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (1997–2000), and established and chaired the Bohdan and Natalia Koval Scholarship Fund at the university, endowing it with more than $100,000.

Source: Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Diaspora, Vol. 1, United States of America, Book 1: A-K. New York–Chicago, 2009, p. 374.