Draft:Platon Simonovich

Platon Simonovich (Serbian: Платон Симоновић; Sremska Kamenica, then Austrian Empire, 1795 - Belgrade, Principality of Serbia, 1866) was a Serbian educational reformer, professor,  Russian state adviser, philanthropist and member of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences. After his retirement, he went to Serbia where he initiated school reforms.

Biography

Platon Simonovich was born in 1795 in Sremska Kamenica and was educated in Vienna before moving to Russia. In Odessa he taught French and was responsible for cataloguing all the works of Voltaire for the University Library connected to the Richelieu Lyceum.

The Simonovićes are originally from Trebjesa near the town of Nikšić, from the Nikšić tribe, and they settled with their relatives in Srpsko Selo, a village near Odessa in 1805, though Platon at the time was attending grade school in Austria where he was born. The move to Russia took place  after participating in the Russo-Turkish wars at the invitation of Russia in 1788-1789, and the attempt to besiege Nikšić, the Simonovich family and their neighbours had to leave Trebjes, which was then destroyed by the Turks. From 1792 to 1805, the transfer of Trebješan to Russia was arranged. In 1805, the Russian emperor Alexander the First granted the Trebješani a plot of land in an uninhabited plain, a day's walk north of Odessa, where they built a settlement that the emperor named Slavjano-Serbskoje, today Serbka. In 1806, Trebješani were included in the army of General Mikhail Miloradovich, which marched to Wallachia, where Bucharest was captured, where they later met with Karađorđe's envoys. In 1812, Trebješani took part in the defense of Imperial Russia during Napoleon's invasion. In 1820, they were entered in the Royal Genealogical Book of Kherson Governorate[4].

Platon Simonovich, however, was born  in 1795 in Sremska Mitrovica and was educated in the best schools in the empire before joining his family and kin in Russia. There he taught French besides science, economy and political science at the Richelieu Lyceum, and played an important part in cataloging thousands of foreign works at the University Library connected to the lyceum. His collection of Voltaire's works is a prime example. He eventually became an Odessa State adviser.

After his retirement in 1850, Platon was invited to the Principality of Serbia to head all schools there as chief inspector. Meanwhile the Serbian government or the Defenders of the Constitution as they were popularly called  were beginning to create a modern judiciary system with appellate, supreme and cassation courts; enactment of the Civil (1844) and Criminal (1850) Codes of Procedure), then came improvement of the school system with the reform led by Platon Simonović.  The emergence of the budget as an accounting mechanism, the development of trade and market relations, as well as the creation of bureaucracy, were just some of the results of the rule of the constitutional defenders. Later regimes relied on their legal and political achievements, which took root more and more. This reflects the historical importance of the government known as Defending the Constitution when Platon Simonovich was carrying out the reforms.

In 1853 Simonovich initiated educational reforms and his approach had a profound impact on the educational system in the years to come. His ideas, however, were politicized in 1856, when Miloš Obrenović, suspicious of outcome of the reform, fired Simonovich from his influential post.

Stojan Novaković was one of the graduates of the school reforms. instituted by Simonovich that encouraged teaching of modern and antiquated languages, Russian, Serbian, French, German, Old Slavonic, Ancient Greek and Latin. 

Simonovich, who died in 1866, did not live long to see the ban lifted and witness the subsequent impact of his ideas.

Philanthropy

In 1742, Platon envisioned and contributed to the construction of a new elementary school building in Sremski Karlovci that had a classroom and an apartment for a live-in teacher and from 1869 the building became a Girls' School. It was preserved as such only until recently when it was demolished for other purposes.