In a dusty office of the Leningrad museum, Yuri Knorozov managed to achieve what scientists around the world had been struggling with for centuries, visiting Mexico only 40 years after his groundbreaking discovery. A simple employee of the Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR learned about the Maya script from a scientific article. It was presented as an unsolvable mystery of humanity. "What has been devised by one human mind can be deciphered by another human mind," Knorozov later said in an interview. In the USSR, no one had tackled this topic before him, so he decided to give it a try. After studying all available documents, he realized that each Maya sign is read as a syllable and proposed a system for reading the entire language. In 1952, Knorozov wrote his dissertation on his method and received a doctoral degree bypassing the candidate's degree. A very rare achievement! Soon, Knorozov's discovery became known worldwide, and he was even allowed to leave the USSR to attend several international conferences. He only saw the monuments of the Maya civilization for the first time in the 1990s - already as an elderly man. Although few in Russia have heard of him, he is still a real star in Latin America.