GOLUBOVICH, GIROLAMO. - Friar Minor, b. at Constantinople on 7 Feb. 1865 to a family originally from Ragusa, d. at Florence on 9 Jan. 1941. G. is the historian of the Franciscan East and particularly of the Custody of the Holy Land. At the age of 12, in 1879, he was taken by his mother on a pilgrimage to the Holy Places and remained there, entering the Seraphic College of Ain-Karin.
On 24 Sept. 1881 he received the Franciscan habit in the Convent of Nazareth, changing his name from Antonio to Girolamo. Ordained a priest on 18 June 1888, he was given the task of reorganizing the new library of the Convent of St. Saviour in Jerusalem, one of the richest in Palestine. It was precisely in this first work that he revealed his vocation as historiographer of the Custody of the Holy Land, but nevertheless for some years he seemed destined to take the path of the apostolate in the various missions of the Custody. Thus in 1889 he was sent to Cyprus, in 1893 to Aleppo in Syria; in 1894 to Alexandria in Egypt and to Port Said, then returning once more to Cyprus as parish priest of Limassol. In 1898 he was sent to Turin, where he presided over the Holy Land section at the Exhibition of sacred art. He closed his properly missionary life with the superiorship of the mission of Constantinople (1902-1904).
His almost perfect knowledge of Greek, Arabic and Turkish, and of many other modern languages, enabled him to range rapidly over the vast ancient and modern Eastern world. His first scholarly work is the Serie dei rev.mi Padri custodi di Terra Santa (Jerusalem 1898); from that time he conceived the vast design of a history of the Custody of the Holy Land, which his superior in Jerusalem approved and encouraged. Thus originated his principal work: the Biblioteca biobibliografica di Terra Santa e dell'Oriente francescano, which to date numbers 22 volumes in octavo. With this work G. intended to seek out, catalogue, copy and publish year by year, century by century, personage by personage, all the material, sifted and illustrated, in expectation of the ordered, complete history of the Franciscan East. In 1899 he published in Milan Il trattato di Terra Santa di frate Francesco Suriano, custode di Terra Santa dal 1493 al 1495 e dal 1512 al 1514; in 1902 in Rome, Ichnographiae locorum et monumentorum Terrae Sanctae accurate delineatae a p. Elzeario Horn O. M., Provinciae Turingiae, 1725-44, from cod. Vat. lat. 9233. In 1904 he was assigned to the College of St. Bonaventure at Quaracchi (Florence), and despite the work he had to attend to together with the other Fathers for the editions then in progress, in 1906 he was able to publish the first volume of his Biblioteca. G. was also the first director of the Archivum Franciscanum historicum (v.), an office he declined shortly thereafter, in order to devote himself to his research.
In 1930 he undertook the reprinting of Wadding's Annales Minorum, which had by then become extremely rare. He made corrections and additions to it, particularly with regard to the missions, such as to make it truly a new edition, completed in Florence in 1935 (25 folio volumes).
In the last years of his life G. left two polemical writings to vindicate the authenticity of the Holy Cenacle of Jerusalem and of the paternal house of St. Francis in Assisi: Il S. Cenacolo, sua autenticità e sue divine prerogative (Florence 1938); La storicità della casa paterna di s. Francesco d'Assisi, oggi «Chiesa Nuova» e la popolare leggenda della «Stalletta» (ibid. 1941).