“Mi corazon siempre ha sido Mexicano”

Mexfiles has often referenced the late Chavela Vargas’s “A Mexican can be born any f*cking place they want” but usually that refers to people born elsewhere but who found their home in Mexico But, in Merida there is a monument to one who — never a resident of Mexico, nor even visiting Mexico for more that short visits — said “In my heart I will always be Mexican”. Yuri Valentinovich Knórozov … although he was far away in Leningrad and Moscow… in his mind and heart was Mexican.

Born in 1922 into a family of Russian intellectuals outside what is (for the present) Kharkiv, Ukraine (see note) his intellectual gifts were noted even as a child. Typical of bright children, he did well in school, except for the one subject that never interested him.. Ukrainian language and history… and was already a star pupil at Leningrad University where he enrolled when he was 17.

His intellectual curiosity focused on Egypt, and within the university, he was recognized as a budding and likely gifted acheologist. Or… given his interest and that of the growing field of Egyptology, a linguist.

Back home to visit his family when the Nazis invaded, and in poor health, he and the family were constantly on the run, from both the Germans and their Ukrainian allies, not managing to find safety in unoccupied Soviet territory until September 1943, when they managed to reach Moscow.

Although a later story would become the legend of his introduction to Mexico… involving the long slog by the Red Army on the road to Berlin, a lucky find in a burning Berlin library and such, the more mundane truth is that his military service was clerical. Part of his duties happened to be cataloging war booty, and opening a box of books, he happened upon a rare edition of Fray Diego de Landa’s 1566 Relación de las cosas de Yucatán and some reproductions of Mayan codices. Yuri didn’t know a word of Spanish, but the glyphs Landa appened as the Mayan “alphabet” and the codices reminded him of Egyptian hieroglyphics, and he either swiped the books, or… much more likely… just asked his commander if he could take them.

Learning Spanish was the easy part. Mayan… that was something else. And, with the “Cold War” that followed the Allied victory shutting out Soviet researchers from their western colleagues .. and vice versa,, it might prove a challenge. Especially when, under the circumstances, Russian archeology and linguistics focused more on their own cultures, and Knórozov went on expeditions throughout the central Asian republics, where he added a deep interest in shamanism and found a religious belief in Sufi Islam. In some ways, the appreciation for both the shamans of Siberia – who use the things of the natural world to reach the divine – and the Sufis, who seek a direct personal experience with their Creator (in some ways similar to Christian Pentacostalism) only worked to spur on his quest to undertand the Mayans.. to read their works, and understand what wisdom they might offer.

Although the political situation.. with the paranoia of the west only equalled by that of the Stalinists made cross-culural intellectual exchange difficult: the westerners assuming any research out of Russia was either fake or a plot to undermine faith in their own assumptions, and the Russians pretty much of the same mind about the westerners, Yuri was able to correspond with his fellow Mayanists in the race to decypher the glyphs. It was almost as if there was an ideological split, with those in the west holding that the glphs were an alphabet, although glyphs for the same “letter” might be written differently, Knórozov held the view that the glyphs were syllables representing not just sounds, but concepts as well.

With people finally starting to realize the study of something like Mayan glyphs had nothing to do with cold war ideology, or politics, Knórozov began to be taken more seriously, as as more and more examples of Mayan writing… thanks mostly to the eccentric English aristocrat Ian Graham … became available, Yuri was able to start studying the frequency of individual glyphs, identifying the 355 vowels and consonants that are combined in each “word” or rather syllable”

“The glyphs written by the ancient Maya consisted of both logograms (signs used to represent a complete word) and phonetic signs, in which each glyph represents a consonant-vowel combination, and that a Maya word formed by a consonant-vowel combination -consonant was written with two glyphs, leaving the vowel of the second glyph unpronounced (principle of synharmony)” to be technical about it.

Later asked how working alone in Russia, he had reached his conclusions and managed to decypher Mayan hieroglyphics for the first time, when people had been unsuccessfully attempting and collaborating with the attempt since the 16^th century, he logically replied, “if somebody wrote it down, they meant it to be read.” He further credited his success to not being primarily an archeologist, digging up artifacts of the past, but approaching the problem as a linguist, and.unsaid, as a shaminist and Sufi_ finding the abstract and unknown in the more approachable things of the natural world.

Having spent a life immersed in the Mayan culture, and honored after the end of the Soviet era by both Guatemala and Mexico, he died at his home in Leningrad in 1997.

The only wonder is why, on the monument unveiled on his 100^th birthday is in Spanish, not Mayan.

• Without getting into contemporary politics, Knórozov considered himself Russian, and a citizen of the soviet Union. After the breakup of the soviet Union, he held a Russian passport, and never considered himself anything other than a Russian, despite recent writings branding him Ukrainian, simply based on where, at that time, the borders layed. For that matter, Leonoid Breznev was born in the same general region,and it would be absurd to claim Breznev wss not a Russian.

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