The botanical legacy of Mihael Dimonie (1870-1935), an almost forgotten plant collector in the southern Balkan Peninsula before the First World War

. Abstract: An up-to-date biography of Mihael Dimonie (1870 – 1935), an important Aromanian plant collector in the southern Balkan Peninsula, is presented. So far, he has been better known to linguists than to botanists on account of the Codex Dimonie and his contributions to Aromanian cultural heritage. His private herbarium collections were destroyed in two separate fires in 1917 and 1944, and only the numerous vouchers belonging to the Plantae Mace­ donicae series that had been commercially distributed remain. These specimens are available in several European and American herbaria and are a lasting testament to Dimonie’s extensive collecting activities in what are today Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and North Macedonia. His collecting localities in the southern Balkans are indicated in a map. Seven names based on material collected by Dimonie and one based on material collected by Ignaz Dörfler are lectotypified and nomenclatural notes for six other taxa are presented. A preliminary list of taxa described (or partly described) from Dimonie’s material includes at least 29 names.


Biography
Mihael Dimonie came from a well-to-do Aromanian family.He was born in 1870 in the family house in Ohrid (North Macedonia), at that time part of the Vilayet of Monastir in the Ottoman Empire (Longinescu 1935;Ştefureac 1984).After completing primary school in Monastir (present-day Bitola), he obtained a scholarship to attend the prestigious Şcoala Normală Superioară high school in Bucharest (Romania).He enrolled at the Faculty of Sciences, University of Bucharest and graduated in 1894 with a teaching diploma (Ştefureac 1984).Studying in Romania was a common practice for future Aromanian teachers in the second half of the 19 th century (Motta 2011).In Bucharest, Dimonie was one of the last students of Dimitrie (Demetrius) Brândză (1846Brândză ( -1895)), a leading botanist and founder of the University Botanical Garden.In 1894, Dimonie returned to what is now North Macedonia and for three years taught natural sciences in a Romanian high school in Bitola (Ştefureac 1984).
In 1889, the German linguist Gustav Weigand, with the help of the two Dimonie brothers Iancu and Mihael, discovered the Codex Dimonie in the Dimonie home in Ohrid (Kahl & Prifti 2016).This collection of 127 sheets of mostly religious texts in early Aromanian language and in Cyrillic script was written by a grand-uncle of the Dimonie brothers at the beginning of the 19 th century (Kahl & Prifti 2016).Due to this important document, the name Dimonie is better known to linguists and historians studying Aromanian heritage than to botanists (Nevaci 2013;Kahl & Prifti 2016).
Dimonie's later interest in medicinal plants may have been influenced by his collaboration with Dimitrie Grecescu (1841Grecescu ( -1910)), who was a professor of medical botany in Bucharest, and also a physician and phytogeographer (Văduva-Poenaru 2000).Dimonie's herbarium vouchers collected between 1895 and 1896 were documented by Grecescu (1899) in a paper written in French entitled Plantes de la Macédonie appartenant au Vilayet de Monastir, recueillies par Michel Dimonié.Most of the records originated from the surroundings of Ohrid and Bitola, some from Mt Pelister (= Peristeri) in the Baba Mts (Grecescu 1899).Based on Dimonie's knowledge of the Aromanian language Grecescu (1899) even included several vernacular plant names in the introduction to his work, and Panţu (1906) added several names provided by Mihael and his brother Iancu in his book on Romanian vernacular plant names.In a later publication written in Romanian, Grecescu (1907) listed approximately 900 taxa.Apart from duplicating records from Grecescu (1899), this work included plants from Thessaloniki and material collected by three students of pharmacy, viz.E. Constantinescu, S. Şunda and N. Petrescu.
Throughout his life, Dimonie was torn between a school career, establishing a successful business and collecting plants, the last of these being his real passion (Longinescu 1935).In 1898, Dimonie was a high school teacher in Caracal (Romania), and then taught in a forestry college in Brăneşti (present-day Colegiul Silvic Branesti "Th.Pietraru") near Bucharest.In 1899, he was appointed professor and principal of the Thessaloniki Commercial High School (Şcoala Comercială din Salonic, École commerciale romaine Salonique), where he stayed until 1912 (see Fig. 1 & 2, depicting his professional visiting card and his handwriting at that time).He started to be a professional plant trader distributing his material as sets of Plantae Macedonicae to important herbaria in Europe such as Vienna, Geneva, Budapest and London (Ştefureac 1986).When the First Balkan War broke out in 1912, he returned to Caracal as professor and, for a time, principal of the Ioniţă Asan high school (present-day Colegiul Naţional "Ioniţă Asan").For unknown reasons, his private herbarium had remained in Thessaloniki and was stored in a chapel from the beginning of the Balkan wars.This entire collection burnt down during the Great Fire of Thessaloniki in 1917 (Longinescu 1935;Ştefureac 1984).Thus his scientific data compiled during 18 years of study on the Balkan flora was regrettably lost.
Dimonie never went back to North Macedonia or Greece but stayed in Romania until his death (Ştefureac 1984).The portrait (Fig. 3) shows Dimonie during the interwar period in Romania, when his botanical interest shifted from the Balkans to the flora of Oltenia in SW Romania, and to medicinal and economic plants (Ştefureac 1984).On the first topic, he only published minor articles such as the flora of Valea Batovei near Batovo (Dimonie 1934).On the second topic, he wrote a book on medicinal plants (Dimonie 1926), a paper on economic plants of Oltenia (Dimonie 1925a), and numerous articles in newspapers and in the popular science journal Natura, e.g. on medicinal plants such as Viola odorata L. (Dimonie 1919) and "hervea româneascor" (a herbal anti-rheumatic drug) (Dimonie 1934).He also published on insect communication (Dimonie 1925b) and even the production of ice cream (Dimonie 1933).In 1931, he wrote a manuscript entitled Synopsis plantarum Scholae Polytechnicae (Dimonie 1931), a compilation of the herbarium contents in the former botanical laboratory of the Polytechnic School in Bucharest (present-day Politehnica University of Bucharest), where his friend and mentor Nicolae Iacobescu (1863Iacobescu ( -1931) ) worked.At least two lithographic copies exist in Bucharest libraries.For this manuscript, he contributed with his own vouchers to "fasc. 1 -Ranunculaceae" (Ştefureac 1984).Only a few vouchers of Ranunculaceae collected after the First Balkan War (1912War ( -1913) ) have survived in the former Polytechnic School herbarium (Herbarul Şcoalei Politehnicei Bucureşti / Laboratorul botanic).These are now stored in BUCF (Fig. 4), i.e. the Alexandru Beldie herbarium, which is owned by the Marin Drăcea National Institute for Research and Development in Forestry (I.N.C.D.S) and situated in Volun tari near Bucharest (Vasile & al. 2016;Lucian Dinca, pers. comm. 2019).Dimonie had originally planned to prepare his doctorate under Nicolae Iacobescu based on the Balkan plant collections of his youth when he retired.However Iacobescu died in 1931, so this idea could not be further pursued (Longinescu 1935).In 1933, Dimonie retired from teaching but kept up his publication activity for the journal Natura (Longinescu 1935).In his last years, Dimonie, together with an English entrepreneur, established a large-scale business cultivating the fibre plant "ghiara pisicei", i.e.Abu tilon theophrasti Medik.(Longinescu 1935;Drăgulescu 2018).They developed 200 hectares of farmland in Brăila county (SE Romania) for this purpose.Dimonie died unexpectedly in Bucharest on 8th December 1935 at the age of 65 (Longinescu 1935).During his lifetime, he wrote approximately 30 popular science articles, most of them outside the field of botany and none about the Balkan flora (Ştefureac 1984).A list of his articles for the journal Natura can be found in Longinescu (1936: 10).
Although he was a contributor to the Flora Roma niae Exsiccata (Cent.VII -XI) in the 1920s and 1930s (Borza 1935), his pre-war Balkan gatherings are more relevant for botanical science.His Balkan material kept in the herbarium of Grecescu was destroyed on 4th April 1944 when the Bucharest herbarium (now BUC) burned down after an Allied air raid (Ştefureac 1986;Văduva-Poenaru 2000).Lack & Sydow (1984).-Reproduced by kind permission, © University Library Uppsala.
Nevertheless, in the Index herbariorum (Thiers 2019+), he is only mentioned for WU and his name is also ignored in the account of Balkan collectors by Křivka & Holubec (2010).Because none of the listed herbaria has its holdings fully catalogued in a database, we cannot know for certain how many specimens Dimonie ever collected and distributed.According to the records at W and WU documenting acquisitions, herbarium WU bought two tranches: 750 vouchers of "plants from Albania" for 225 Austro-Hungarian kronen in February 1909, and 700 vouchers of "plants from Macedonia" for 267.40 Austro-Hungarian kronen in February 1910, a total of 1450 herbarium vouchers.Herbarium W acquired 555 vouchers of Plantae Macedonicae in 1909 (Steindachner 1910: 30), and 641 vouchers from "Pflanzen aus Mazedonien" in 1910 (Steindachner 1911: 29), in total 1196 vouchers.Unfortunately, the number of Dimonie vouchers in WU-Hal-Europaeum has not been documented.Because the original price for one voucher around 1910 was approximately 3 kronen, this would now be 15 € at purchasing-power parity.
Apart from his commercial sets of Plantae Mace donicae, issued often with conspicuous pre-printed labels of blue indelible ink (Fig. 5, 8B, 10), Dimonie also sold specimens provided only with handwritten labels, especially those considered rare or more interesting than the bulk of plants he distributed (Fig. 6,8A,11,12).It should also be noted that Dimonie often distributed herbarium specimens without any identification (Fig. 5, 8A, 10).
Dimonie collected much material in North Macedonia, especially in the surroundings of Ohrid and Bitola, also in Struga, Sv.Naum, Resen, Debar and in the Baba, Galičica, Jablanica and Korab Mts.In Greece, he collected near Thessaloniki, Mt Athos, Mt Vermio, near Edessa, at the border region with North Macedonia (Voras Mts/ Nidže Mt, Mt Tzena/Kožuf, near Gevgelija), and on the N Aegean islands of Limnos and Thasos.Approximately 320 taxa have been registered for the Flora Hellenica Database (Kit Tan, unpublished;Strid & Tan 2017).A list of localities based on verified extant material is provided in Table 1.A map of Dimonie's collecting localities based on specimens as well as publications (Grecescu 1899(Grecescu , 1907) can be found in Fig. 7.According to the Flo ra Hellenica Database, some of his collections are new for Greece, e.g.Primula elatior (L.) L. collected in April 1909 in a forest near the Prodromos monastery on Mt Athos (WU 0104412), and at Mt Doxa/Mt Vermio (WU 0104413).This information had already been published by Fritsch (1916: 295 -296), but was overlooked for a long time (Eleftheriadou & Raus 1996).
Dimonie collected in the European part of the late Ottoman Empire, but not within the Kingdom of Greece.His collections are therefore not mentioned in Halácsy's Conspectus florae graecae (1901 -1912), although Dimonie was in good contact with the Austro-Hungarian botanist and had visited him in Vienna in 1909 [unpublished letters kept in Uppsala; see Lack & Sydow (1984)].Halácsy's Herbarium Europaeum (WU-Halácsy-Europaeum) contains a large number of plants collected by Dimonie.
In 1909, Dimonie was collecting in the Pirin Mts ("Perin Dagh") and the SW Rila Mts near Blagoevgrad in Bulgaria, at that time part of the Ottoman Empire.The Pirin Mts were, according to Velenovský (1911), a mountain range "almost unknown to botanists at that time".The SW Rila Mts formed the border to the newly independent Bulgaria, and Dimonie therefore repeatedly wrote "ad extremum finis Turco-Bulgariae" on his vouchers.
It is not known how many taxa botanists have described based on Dimonie specimens.Since type material was often part of his Plantae Macedonicae series, isotypes and syntypes are available in many herbaria.More than two dozen type specimens and other authentic material mostly from W, WU and PRC can currently be viewed via Virtual Herbaria JACQ (https://herbarium.univie.ac.at/database/search.php).Additional specimens of Dimonie are available online, e.g.via the Dutch botanical collections of Naturalis, i.e.L (http://bioportal.naturalis .nl/),Sweden's Virtual Herbarium, i.e.GB, LD, S (http:// herbarium.emg.umu.se/), the herbarium catalogue of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, i.e.E (https://data .rbge.org.uk/search/herbarium/) and the database of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, i.e.US (https://collections.nmnh.si.edu/search/botany/).In Appendix 1, we lectotypify seven names and present nomenclatural notes on six others that were described based on material collected by Dimonie, and lectotypify one name based on material collected by Ignaz Dörfler.In Appendix 2, we present a preliminary list of 29 names based on plant material collected by Dimonie.
Verbascum dimoniei was described based on specimens from North Central Greece (Fetitza prope Njausta [Naoussa]) distributed by Dimonie as Plantae Macedo nicae no.327.It occurs in Greece and North Macedonia (Velenovský 1911) and is very similar to V. grae cum Boiss., but was accepted in Marhold (2011f) and Dimopoulos & al. (2013).The holotype in PRC was mounted onto two sheets; the one with the original label is depicted in Fig. 10.
As is often the case with large sets of material within series, his distributed exsiccata contain mixed gatherings.Persson (1999: 77)  Nevertheless, the thousands of vouchers collected by Dimonie in the southern Balkan Peninsula between 1894 and 1912 render him one of the most important plant collectors of his time, even though only the commercial specimens from 1907 to 1910 are preserved.His contributions to the flora of Greece and North Macedonia are comparatively well known to science (Greuter 1975;Strid 1978;Matevski 2009), but those for the floras of the Albanian border regions (Fig. 6,8,11,12) and for the Pirin and SW Rila Mts in Bulgaria (Fig. 5, 8B) are almost forgotten (see, however, Baldacci 1925;Stefanoff 1930;Stojanoff & Achtaroff 1935).In comparison to the privileged situation that many professional taxonomists at universities or museums enjoyed, Dimonie's position as a plant trader and teacher did not permit him to publish his material himself.He was hindered by a lack of time, botanical literature and a large institutional herbarium where he could compare and identify his specimens.He was fully aware of these circumstances and, in a letter to Halácsy, regretted this as well as the high expenses incurred for his journeys and the low remuneration received for his specimens.
His private herbarium, probably one of the most comprehensive collections of the Balkan flora in his time, and his Balkan vouchers deposited in the herbarium Grecescu in BUC were destroyed in the two World Wars.What remains are his commercial vouchers from 1907 to 1910, which he had sold to herbaria all over Europe, and his contributions to Aromanian cultural heritage (Codex Di monie, Aromanian plant names and ethnobotany).Despite all shortcomings, the scientific value of his Plantae Macedonicae is obvious and his vouchers are still used by taxonomists.Košanin (1912: 208) already regretted that "Dimonie's vouchers [from the Korab Mts] are stored unpublished in various herbaria".Now we stand at the same position more than a hundred years later and only the complete digitization of major European herbaria including OCR-aided databasing of label information can help (Drinkwater & al. 2014;Soltis 2017;Besnard & al. 2018).This would contribute to a thorough knowledge of the extant gatherings of often forgotten historic collectors like Mihael Dimonie.

Appendix 1: Typifications of, and nomenclatural notes on, selected taxa described from plant material collected by Mihael Dimonie
In this Appendix, we lectotypify seven names of taxa described from herbarium material collected by Mihael Dimonie, plus one by Ignaz Dörfler, and present their current taxonomic treatments.Lectotypification is not necessary for the majority of names published by Velenovský (1911), who, according to his introduction, worked only with the vouchers in PRC and usually only one voucher is extant there, therefore qualifying as the holotype.For other names, the holotype was already indicated in the protologue, e.g.Anthyllis alpestris subsp.vitellina W. Becker (Becker 1912), Hesperis verroiana Dvořák (Dvořák 1966) and Viola pascua W. Becker (Becker 1928).Others have been lectotypified already, e.g.Alys sum obtusifolium subsp.helioscopioides Nyár.(Hartvig 2002: 222), or the lectotype was chosen from a syntype not collected by Dimonie, e.g.Astragalus monachorum Širj.(Strid 1986: 467).For Cerastium fontanum subsp.balcanum Gartner, we designate a voucher collected by Dörfler as the lectotype, because this is the best preserved and most representative among a number of available syntypes.Because several lectotypifications were previously done only in schedis, it should be mentioned that typifications are achieved only by effective publication (Turland & al. 2018: Art. 7.10).Apart from the lectotypifications, we present nomenclatural notes for six other taxa.In the protologue, Nyárády (1929) did not indicate a type, but rather a single gathering by Dimonie in the herbaria Degen (today BP) and WU that he had consulted.Deposited in WU are two vouchers most likely originating from the same gathering and both annotated by Nyárády in 1926. Hartvig (2002) performed a (probably unintentional) lectotypification by indicating one of the two vouchers in WU as the type by its slightly different label text (cf.WU 0033165); see Turland & al. (2018: Art. 9.22).Additional isolectotypes can be found in the herbaria E (E00438386) and W (W 1910-0005921).

Alyssum punctatum
Anthyllis alpestris subsp.vitellina W. Becker in Beih. Bot. Centralbl., Abt. 2, 29: 26. 1912  In the protologue, Becker (1912) mentions Velenovský's variety ("A.vulneraria var.vitellina Vel.?").However, the question mark renders subsp.vitellina the validly published name of a new taxon, not a new combination.Becker cited the same gathering by Dimonie, like Velenovský (1911), but indicated the herbarium WU as the main source for his studies; therefore, the single voucher in this herbarium can be considered as the holotype and the duplicate vouchers in PRC and W as isotypes (see under A. vulneraria var.vitellina below).

Astragalus monachorum
In the protologue, Širjaev (1939) cited syntypes collected by Friedrichsthal, Dimonie, Brener, Pichler, Janka, Sintenis and Bornmüller, all originating from the upper regions of Mt Athos.Strid (1986) designated as the lectotype a voucher by Pichler in G-Boiss; however, it remains doubtful if the voucher in WU indicated as an isolectotype by Zarre in scheda in 1996 really belongs to the same gathering, because the given locality is slightly different and the voucher lacks a collecting number by Pichler (WU 0068226).The same holds true for the duplicates in E (E00021216) and PRC (PRC-Phanerogamae 452029) indicated as "isotype".Syntypes can be found in the herbaria B (B 100279205, B 100279206), LD (1793342), W (W 0026158, W 0026159) and WU (WU-Halácsy-Europaeum 0068224, WU 0068225, WU 0068227).

Hesperis verroiana
In the protologue, Dvořák (1966) indicated the holotype in PR, which was depicted in a low-quality black and white image in tab.IV(1) of that publication.The original, unmounted herbarium label of the holotype was later lost and an almost identical label from the isotype in PRC copied and mounted instead on the voucher in PR (Fig. 9).Isotypes can be found in the herbaria LD (LD 1002566), PRC (PRC-Phanerogamae 455747), W (W 1910-0005752) and WU (WU 0028099, WU 0028100).

Myosotis villicaulis
For his revision, Domin (1940) consulted the herbaria of the Charles University (PRC) and the National Museum (PR) in Prague as well as the herbarium of the Masaryk University (BRNU) in Brno.In the protologue, Domin (1940) cited several gatherings by Dimonie.None of the syntypes could be found in the herbaria W and WU.Obviously, Domin (1940) was not aware of Ves tergren's work on Myosotis sylvatica (Vestergren 1939), published a year earlier, and neither did Vestergren (1939) know the material Domin used for his description of M. villicaulis.Because the specimen designated here as the lectotype exhibits acute nutlets, we consider it to be a hairy form of M. sylvatica subsp.cyanea (Hayek) Vestergr., according to Grau & Merxmüller (1972) and Strid (1991).A close relationship to M. cyanea (Hayek) Domin (≡ M. sylvatica subsp.cyanea) was already anticipated by Domin (1940).

Silene perinica
When describing Silene perinica in his Plantae no vae orientales, Hayek (1924) mentioned neither a type nor a herbarium, but only that his new species was collected in "Macedonia" on "Jel-Tepe Perindaghr" and distributed as S. graminea by "J.Dimonie".Greuter & al. (1997) supposed the type specimens to be in WU or GB.In the treatment of Euphorbia imperfoliata Vis., another species mentioned in the same paper, Hayek (1924: 334) stressed that he worked in the Natural History Museum, Vienna (W) for his account.Rechinger (1939: 167) stated that he had seen "Hayeks Original" and "Typus" in W. The lectotype chosen here even contains a handwritten annotation by Hayek: "S.perinica m. n. sp.", whereas the type material in WU lacks annotations or revisions by Hayek (isolectotypes: WU 0104796, WU 0104798; syntypes: WU 0104797, WU 0104799).

Soldanella dimoniei
Although working in WU, Vierhapper (1909) did not indicate the type or a herbarium in his description of S. dimoniei.Therefore, the "holotype" mentioned by Zhang & Kadereit (2004: 743) has to be designated as the lectotype.The mere handwritten designation on the voucher as "Originalexemplare" and, by a later hand, "i.e.HOLO-TYPUS" (Fig. 11) does not achieve designation of a lectotype according to Turland & al. (2018: Art. 7.10); see also McNeill (2014).The "isotype" in WU mentioned by Zhang & Kadereit (2004: 743) is from the Halácsy herbarium, a private collection most likely not available to Vierhapper, because it was only later incorporated into WU (Lack 1980)."Macedonia" is indicated only on the label of the isolectotype in Halácsy's herbarium (WU- ), neither on the lectotype from the exsiccata series Plantae Macedonicae (Fig. 11) nor on the isolectotype in W (W 1909-0007371), nor in Vierhapper (1909), where the species is stated to have been collected "im zentralen Albanien" (in central Albania) (cf. Vierhapper 1914: 243).
Fig. 7. Map of Dimonie's collecting localities in the southern Balkan Peninsula.-Red lines: historical borders of the Ottoman Empire in 1908 sensuKunz & al. (2003), kindly provided by Bogdan G. Popescu(Popescu 2017); green dots: data fromGrecescu (1899Grecescu ( , 1907)); red dots: data from extant herbarium vouchers including data from the Flora Hellenica Database; question marks: exact localities not traceable; Dimonie's places of residence are underlined; mountains are in italics.

Fig. 8
Fig.8.A: Label of the holotype of Satureja subspicata var.macedonica Velen., collected in the Korab Mts in July 1908 (PRC-Phanerogamae 451330)."Satureja sp.n." was written on the original label by J. Velenovský, who described the variety(Velenovský 1911).As often, Dimonie distributed the voucher without identification.Although he wrote "Albania", the voucher more likely was collected in North Macedonia.-B: Label of the isolectotype of Saxifraga discolor Velen.(PRC-Phanerogamae 451704), see Appendix 1. Dimonie distributed it without identification, but with a request to have it named after him should it prove to be a novelty.

Fig. 10 .
Fig. 10.The holotype of Verbascum dimoniei Velen. is mounted on two sheets in PRC; this is one of them (PRC-Phanerogamae 451369).The type locality is Fetitza (Fitia) near Njausta (Naoussa) in the foothills of Mt Vermio in Greece.

Fig. 12 .
Fig. 12. Label of the isolectotype of Soldanella dimoniei Vierh.(WU-Halácsy-Europaeum 0040240), see Appendix 1. Dimonie probably wrote the label by hand during his visit to Vienna in February 1909, when he knew from Vierhapper (misspelt as "Fierhap.")that his collection represented a new species to be published soon, in April 1909; see Vierhapper (1909).

Table 1 .
Dimonie's collecting localities in the southern Balkan Peninsula based on herbarium specimens verified to be extant.Current toponyms, if available, are in parentheses.-Country codes: AL = Albania; BG = Bulgaria; GR = Greece; MK = North Macedonia.