Lithuanian Register

Lithuanian Register ( Lithuanian: Lietuvos Metrika; Ukrainian: Литовська метрика; Lytovska metryka). A register listing and describing documents issued and received by the chancellery of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from the end of the 14th century to 1794. The name is applied also to the chancellery archive, which consisted of 566 volumes of registration lists, and to a variety of original documents or copies—treaties, instructions to ambassadors and their reports, charters granting lands or privileges, permits and licenses, court decisions, appointment lists, and military instructions. The earliest documents were written mostly in the chancellery version of Ruthenian; others were written in Latin, Polish, German, and even Arabic. At the beginning of the 16th century the archive was moved from Trakai castle to the Low Castle in Vilnius. When in 1569 Volhynia voivodeship, Bratslav voivodeship, and Kyiv voivodeship were transferred to Poland by the Union of Lublin, the documents pertaining to those territories were deposited in a special Volhynian Register in Warsaw, and documents connected with Galicia were preserved at the Crown Register in Cracow. In 1765 the Crown Register was moved to Warsaw and was supplemented with the rest of the Lithuanian Register from Vilnius. After the partition of Poland the Lithuanian Register was transferred to the Russian imperial archive in Saint Petersburg, and the Volhynian Register and the Galician documents of the Polish national archive were integrated with it. In 1887 the archive was moved to Moscow. Today it is located at the Central State Archive of Old Documents in Moscow. Some materials from the Lithuanian Register have been published in the collections Akty, otnosiashchiesia k istorii Iuzhnoi i Zapadnoi Rossii (Documents on the History of Southern and Western Russia, 1863–92) and Akty, otnosiashchiesia k istorii Zapadnoi Rossii (Documents on the History of Western Russia, 1846–53) and in publications of the Kyiv Archeographic Commission.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Grimsted, P.; Sułkowska-Kurasiowa, I. The ‘Lithuanian Metrica’ in Moscow and Warsaw: Reconstructing the Archives of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Cambridge, Mass 1984)

Arkadii Zhukovsky

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]