**CHAIKOVSKY (Čajkovskij), Pyotr Ilyich.** – Russian musician, b. at Votkinsk on 7 May 1840, d. at St. Petersburg on 6 Nov. 1893. He studied law and at the age of 20 was a government employee; he attended composition courses at the St. Petersburg Conservatory under Rubinstein, graduating in 1865. He taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1866 to 1879 and traveled and lived abroad extensively.
He wrote several stage works, orchestral pieces, songs, choral works, and a Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (1878, op. 41, Russian Mass), composed with the intention of restoring sacred music to the purity of ancient ecclesiastical modes. It was successfully performed in concerts at the Moscow Conservatory. He also composed 17 sacred chants for choir on ancient liturgical melodies (1882, op. 52), 6 chants for the cherubim (1885), 6 sacred hymns (1885). In 1882 he prepared the critical edition of the complete works of Bortniansky, a distinguished Russian composer of sacred music.
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**CIALDI, Alessandro.** – Navigator and scholar of hydraulic and nautical sciences, papal naval officer, b. at Civitavecchia on 9 Apr. 1807, d. at Rome on 16 June 1882. In 1840, as captain commanding a small naval squadron, he became the first European to sail up the Nile for 1,164 km from its mouth, and after inscribing the name of Gregory XVI on the Temple of Isis on the island of Philae, he returned to Rome (28 Aug. 1841), bringing back a valuable collection of archaeological, nautical, and naturalistic materials and information, as well as four large alabaster parallelepipeds donated by the Viceroy of Egypt to the Pope for the rebuilding of the basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls.
It was owing to Cialdi that a modest but well-organized papal fleet was able in 1848 to operate successfully in the Adriatic alongside other Italian forces against the Austrian fleet, and in 1860 it managed to supply arms and munitions to the fortress of Ancona just as it was about to be besieged. In 1867 he wisely thwarted the bold attempts of Garibaldi’s men to raid and land along the Lazio coast and on the Tiber, such as that of the Cairoli brothers; nor did Cialdi and his sailors remain inactive in 1870 as events rapidly unfolded.
From then on, loyal to the Pope, he retired to private life to devote himself to his favorite studies: noteworthy are his regulation of the courses of the Tiber and the Serechio; his improvements and perfecting of the ports of Livorno, Genoa, Pesaro, Civitavecchia, Fiumicino, and Anzio; his significant contribution to the technical and financial support for the cutting of the Suez Isthmus and the conduct of the works themselves, also as a member of the special papal commission; and his work in implementing and fully and rationally illuminating the coasts of the Tyrrhenian ports of the Roman State. Cialdi’s principal scientific merit was the discovery and definitive formulation of the hydrodynamic theory of wave motion and shore currents, for which, on 18 March 1878, the Academy of Sciences in Paris enrolled him among its members, while he had already belonged to the Pontifical Academy of the New Lincei since 1847 and became its president in 1879, succeeding Angelo Secchi. At his death, Cialdi left his rich and rare scientific library to the city of Civitavecchia, where he was buried in the cemetery with an epitaph composed by the historian of the papal navy, Alberto Guglielmotti.
Among Cialdi’s works, numbering over fifty, the following deserve special mention: *Relation de deux voyages exécutés par la marine militaire des Etats Romains dans les années 1840–42*, in *Annales maritimes et coloniales* (Paris 1843); *Sul Tevere, sulla linea più conveniente per l’unione dei due mari e sulla marina mercantile dello Stato Pontificio* (Rome 1847); *Sul moto ondoso del mare e sulle correnti di esso specialmente su quello litorali* (ibid. 1843; 2nd ed. greatly enlarged, ibid. 1846); *Port Said. A M. F. De Lesseps... lettre du comm. A. C.*, etc. (ibid. 1868); *Nozioni preliminari per un trattato sulla costruzione dei porti sul Mediterraneo* (ibid. 1874); *Illuminazione e segnalamento dei litorali e dei porti* (ibid. 1878).
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**CHAMICH, Mikayel.** – Armenian Mekhitarist monk of Venice, b. at Constantinople in 1738, d. there in 1823. A distinguished figure among Orientalist scholars, he was an apostle of the union of Armenians with the Church of Rome during his successive residences in Constantinople, Aleppo, Bassora, and Transylvania. He spent much of his life at San Lazzaro in Venice, among books and Armenian codices.
He refuted the errors of Jacob Nalian, the dissident Armenian patriarch of Constantinople, in his monumental apologetic work, which he entitled *The Shield of Orthodoxy*, in four large volumes. Notable is his *Commentary on the Psalms*, in ten volumes, composed from direct study of the Hebrew text. His masterpiece, however, is the *History of Armenia*, an ambitious undertaking for his time, in three volumes in-quarto, based on direct study of Eastern sources, and still today the most complete and systematic history of Armenia. An abridged English translation of this work has been made: M. Chamichian, *History of Armenia*, 2 vols., Calcutta 1827.