SEALS AND COATS OF ARMS OF MUKACHEVO IN THE RESEARCH OF OLEKSIY FILIPPOV

In this article, the author tried to analyze and evaluate Oleksiy Filippov's research on the seal and coat of arms of the city of Mukachevo, which became his second homeland. Since 2002, he has been visiting the State Archives of the Transcarpathian Region in Berehovo weekly to find documents about Mukachevo's seals and coat of arms. The researcher was interested in the figure of St. Martin. He printed his first articles about the city coat of arms of Mukachevo in the local periodical press. He was one of the first to publish the charter of the Hungarian Queen Elizabeth, dated May 22, 1376. With this document, the settlers of the Munkach villa (Mukachevo) were granted the right to use a seal with the image of St. Martin. In researching the Mukachevo coat of arms, O. Filippov was interested in the following questions: 1. When exactly should the Day of Mukachevo be celebrated - from the time of issuing a seal with the image of St. Martin?; 2. What should Mukachevo's coat of arms be?; 3. What colour solution of this coat of arms? O. Filippov, while working as a journalist for the newspaper «Stariy Zamok,» tried to return the historical coat of arms of the city - St. Martin on a horse. Instead, his proposals were ignored, and as a result, Mukachevo today has a coat of arms with the figure of a priest but with the legend of St. Martin on a horse, next to which is a beggar (a sword and half a cloak in a shield held by a priest). According to O. Filippov, the day of the city should be celebrated on May 22. In 2012, as a result of long-term research, he published the work «Under the Cloak of St. Martin (History of the Coat of Arms of the City of Mukachevo 1376-1943». In this work, O. Filippov described 24 seals of the city of Mukachevo: 14 of them belong to the period of the Kingdom of Hungary, the Austrian and Austro-Hungarian Empires (1376, 1652, 1816, 1844, 1872, 1873, 1902 (6),1914, 1914 – 1916), 8 to the period of Subcarpathian Rus of the Czechoslovak Republic (1919, 1920, 1923 (2), 1925, 1928, 1929, 1933), 2 to the period of the Hungarian Kingdom (1938, 1943). O. Filippov planned further to study the seals and coat of arms of Mukachevo, but his premature death prevented this.