An interview with Yuriy Temirov, associate professor at the department of international relations and foreign policy and dean of the history department at Donetsk National University, temporarily located in Vinnytsia. Interviewer: Andrzej Szeptycki.
ANDRZEJ SZEPTYCKI: Yuriy Teshabayovich Temirov; that is an unusual name for a Ukrainian. How did your ancestors come to settle in Ukraine and, more specifically, in Donbas?
YURIY TEMIROV: My father’s surname, Temirov, originates from the Turkic group of languages. He was of Kyrgyz nationality yet lived in Andijan, a city in Uzbekistan. However, there are no relatives of mine left there since my father grew up in an orphanage. It is difficult to say how he lost his parents. Experts on the history of this region suspect that his name was somehow connected to the fight with the Basmachi (an uprising against Russian Imperial and Soviet rule in Central Asia – editor’s note) as his first name, Teshabay, had the ending “bay” or “bey”, which points to a specific descent. In Soviet times my father served in the army in Belarus. There he met some people who were recruiting workers to the Donbas region. He was offered a factory job with decent pay, good working conditions, and soon enough he was able to get a flat in the company town. As there was no relatives back in Uzbekistan that my father could go back to, he accepted the job offer and that is how he ended up in Donbas – in Khartsyzk, a highly industrialised city located some 30 kilometres away from the city of Donetsk. My mother, on the other hand, came from the Khmelnytskyi province. After she had finished horticulture school she was posted to Donbas. That is how she met my father. They settled in Donbas, where I was born in 1964.
