This week we are commemorating the 95th anniversary of the birth of Guy Picarda, a London lawyer and musicologist who was for many decades striving to present Belarusian culture to the outside world. As Prof Arnold McMillin put in a newspaper obituary at the time, “Few Westerners have better promoted the culture of Belarus abroad than the Anglo-French lawyer Guy Picarda…”.
Born in Tottenham, north London, of mixed French-Breton and Anglo-Irish parentage, with his father being a distinguished French lawyer, and having graduated from prestigious UK and French universities, Guy was destined for a top legal career. Less obviously, he was fated to become a prominent scholar and promoter of Belarusian music, history, and culture.
Guy loved telling the family story that one of his French ancestors, a soldier in Napoleon’s army, lost an ear to frostbite while crossing the Biarezina in 1812. His own interest in Belarus, however, developed through Slavonic church music when he sang in an Orthodox cathedral choir in Paris. In the 1950s, he established close links with the Belarusian community in London and became its integral part. He would become one of the key persons developing English-language Belarusian studies in the UK, the only country in the world where such studies were pursued at a continuous institutional level.
He initiated or keenly supported every Belarusian initiative in English, from being one of the founding members and longtime chair of the Anglo-Belarusian Society to a founder of and a prolific contributor to the Journal of Belarusian Studies to translating and compiling a sizable collection of Belarusian church and folk music. Using his mastery of the English language, he strived to elevate the international image of Belarus from a downtrodden Russian-Polish borderland to a place with an original, ancient and rich culture and civilisation.
Guy was widely known in Belarusian circles outside the UK. He corresponded with several Presidents of the Rada of the Belarusian Democratic Republic in exile and in 1969 was awarded honorary citizenship of the BDR. He established links with the Belarusian composers Viktar Skorabahataŭ and Anatol Bahatyroŭ, and for many years was a judge at a festival of ecclesiastical music in Mahiloŭ “Almighty God” (“Магутны Божа”).
Guy was one of the original trustees of our library and a long-time music librarian. Apart from his substantial intellectual contribution, he made generous private donations to the library’s collection of books, old maps, old coins and postal stamps.
The Skaryna Library preserves a precious archive of Guy Picarda’s documents, research articles and correspondence that are still awaiting researchers. Among them – а passport of the citizen of the Belarusian Democratic Republic, issued to the international lawyer Guy Reginald Pierre Picarda in Paris by the President of the BDR Mikoła Abramčyk.
