Guruleva, Vera

Numismatist specialized in Byzantine coinage at the State Hermitage Museum

Vera Guruleva (* 1951) obtained her B.A. and M.A. in History at St. Petersburg State University (1971-1978). Her main area of interest was the history of ancient Greece and Rome, the title of her diploma work translating as “The Social and Political History of Ancient Syracuse in the Archaic Period”. From 1995 to 2000, she underwent the post-graduate external PhD program at the Numismatic Department of the State Hermitage Museum and passed examinations for the PhD. The title of her doctoral thesis translates as “The History of the Collection of Byzantine Coins of the Hermitage in the Context of the Origin and the Development of Byzantine Numismatics in Russia (end of XVIII – XX centuries)”.

In 1971, Vera Guruleva became Assistant Curator at the Numismatic Department of the State Hermitage Museum before she became Curator of ancient Greek coins there (1980-1983). Since 1981, she has been Senior Research Associate at this institution and is responsible for ancient Greek, ancient Roman, and Byzantine coinage.
Her research interests also cover Byzantine metrology. Other main fields of interest are Byzantine, Trebizond and the Second Bulgarian Kingdom coins in Crimea, and Byzantine coins in Old Rus’ for which she analyses the causes and ways of reception of Byzantine coins in Russia, and how they were used by the local population. 

Vera Guruleva authored c. 140 papers and articles in topics from numismatics and adjacent areas. She specializes in various fields of numismatics and history, namely in the history of the Hermitage collection of Byzantine coins and the history of the development of Byzantine numismatics in Russia, on which she wrote about 30 articles and abstracts alone. She has prepared the manuscript of I. Tolstoy’s “Byzantine Coins. 10th issue” (1991) for publication, and currently works on publishing a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. 

Vera Guruleva was responsible for organizing and curating the 2007/08 temporal exhibition “Gods on Coins” at the Hermitage for which she also co-authored the catalog (“Gods on Coins: Ancient Greece, Rome and Byzantium”, 2007). She also wrote the catalog of Byzantine weights in the Hermitage’s collection (2011). She is currently working on a catalog of Trebizond coins in the Hermitage and on the electronic catalog of the Museum’s Byzantine coinage.

Over the course of 10 years, Vera Guruleva contributed to more than 100 conferences in Russia and abroad, among them the 19th and 21st-23rd International Congresses of Byzantine Studies, and the XIII-XV International Numismatic Congresses.

Vera Guruleva held a Fellowship at the Dumbarton Oaks Center, Washington D.C. in 1996, her research subject being 12th-15th century Byzantine coins. From 2001 and 2014, she studied the collections of Byzantine coins at the American Numismatic Society, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and the British Museum in London. 

You can e-mail Vera Guruleva by clicking here or here.

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And this is her profile at academia.edu.