Lviv, Ukraine — A month after Russian forces invaded Ukraine, photographer Roman Metelsky stands on the platform of this western city’s Art Nouveau domed train station with a woman fleeing the east. I was looking at a train full of children. But he was waiting for a carriage from the opposite direction. This one came from the west and was full of bubble wrap.
Few Ukrainian cultural institutions were prepared for a full-scale invasion. Museums, churches, castles and libraries had no documentation or guidance on how to preserve the nation’s priceless art.
“We had to start from scratch,” Metelsky said. “I asked for packing materials. For financial support. Please give me advice on how to store and pack.”
So, with the government in wartime mode, he and other arts professionals formed the Center for Cultural Heritage Relief, a special preservation commission, over coffee in early March. (In this Habsburg city, Mr. Metelsky explained that “everything happens with coffee.”)
“We were pretty surprised,” Metelsky said. “We thought the instructions already existed.”
Ivan Shchulko, a member of the Lviv provincial council who was present at that first-day coffee conference, remembers feeling terrified and confused as they searched for help. I was looking for people with the same interests, the same values,” he said.
They contacted many museums and palaces in Poland, and on March 27, a train arrived from Warsaw laden with cardboard boxes and bags of Styrofoam beads. On April 4th, another urgent shipment of packaging materials and protective gloves arrived from Norway and Denmark. Other supplies came from German, Latvian, and Estonian libraries, and British and Slovenian museums.
Teams from Lviv stuffed packing materials into the backseats of vans and cars and transported supplies across the border to vulnerable facilities in Chernihiv, Dnipro, Kharkov and Zaporizhia. By June, Mr. Shchurko and his Mr. Metelskiy were managing tons of foam his coreboards and tons of plastic film filling the lobby of the university library. This is a more cultural kind of humanitarian assistance.
“In wartime, there are two irreparable losses: people and our culture,” Meletsky said. “The rest can be rebuilt.”
As the Ukrainian military ramps up its counterattack in the east this summer, heritage experts in the west are engaged in related battles to preserve Ukrainian monuments, museums, historical collections and religious sites. The Russian invasion is essentially a culture war, with ruins damaged by both false artillery and targeted destruction. are accused of The foundations of the regional museum on the outskirts of the capital Kyiv and the museum in the northeastern city of Kharkiv have been burned to the ground.
But while Ukrainian soldiers rely on a centralized chain of command, the private army, which is made up of academics, curators, archivists and architects, said it received little valuable guidance.
Officials in Kyiv and local administration have taken steps to ensure that the national heritage is not damaged. The Ministry of National Culture hosts workshops, obtains commitments from international partners, and maintains a public database of damaged and destroyed monuments for future legal claims.
“Before the full-scale war, the Ministry of Culture was doing its best to protect our cultural heritage, but we were not ready for such barbaric actions,” he said. Katerina Chueva, Deputy Minister of Culture, Church and Historical Archives of Ukraine. “But what we are seeing now in western Ukraine is that people are passionate about preserving and preserving their cultural heritage.”
Coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian War
The ministry declined to detail the number of collections involved in the evacuation, citing wartime exigencies. But in interviews with museum directors and other heritage leaders in Lviv and Kyiv, there was a common saying.
“Our officials who cut us off and leave the cultural sphere with minimal resources make us work even harder,” Meretsky said.
Therefore, by coordinating via WhatsApp groups and WeTransfer files and raising funds on crowdfunding platforms, we have made great strides in preserving endangered icons and artwork.
“It’s very difficult, but it’s a great opportunity to help my colleagues,” said Olha Honchar, 29, curator of the Territory of Terror Memorial Museum, which chronicles Nazi and Soviet history. “I understood that from the first days of the war, the Lviv region began to become a shelter, and the Lviv Museum became an intermediary from donor countries.”
Early March, Hong Cha establish a nonprofit organization We have funded more than 750 museum workers in eastern and southern Ukraine. Mostly he’s less than $100, and the payment, delivered via a smartphone app, has helped keep arts institution employees who are no longer paid salaries above water.
Ukrainian refugees were welcomed by European cultural institutions, but those left behind needed urgent humanitarian assistance that these arts institutions were not ready to provide. Foreign donors were reaching out, but they wanted spending controls that the war-torn people could not provide.
“We need packing materials,” said Hongcha. “But we also need to help those who work with these packaging materials. We have to support the human potential of Ukrainian culture.”
From Austria to Poland to Soviet rule in the 20th century, Lviv’s legacy has been at risk before. During World War II, the Nazis looted the city’s art collections. Dürer’s painting The work, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, was kept in the library in Lviv until 1941. After World War II, Soviet authorities suppressed not only abstract art, but also Ukrainian nationalist-themed art, religious art, including Baroque statues. It is due to Johann Georg Pinsel, the most important artist of the city’s Habsburg era.
Today, the pincel twisted saints in front of St. George’s Cathedral in Lviv are wrapped in gray plastic bags wrapped in cords and duct tape. Archbishop Roman Kravczyk fingered a jeweled cross around his neck and muttered, “May God have mercy on their souls.”
Honchar and her Lviv colleagues helped evacuate collections from several small regional museums to relative safety in western Ukraine. Several Kharkov and Chernihiv institutions also managed to move part of their collections here. At least one of her museums in Odessa hosted a major touring exhibition in January, without jeopardizing its holdings.
The largest art museum in the country, the Lviv National Museum, with more than 10 branches in the city and its surrounding areas, was only half-prepared before the invasion. Initially, few thought the war would reach this far west, but one missile landed about 200 meters from one of the institute’s castles, leaving a fragile wreckage on the grounds. It housed a collection of Chinese and Japanese ceramics.
A senior museum official, Vasyl Mitsko, expressed his dismay with a dark optimism born of Ukraine’s tumultuous history. “In Ukrainian,” he said in an air alert.
Museum collections are safe for now. Painting collection prizes have been moved to several undisclosed locations. However, many of Pinsel’s gilded statues remain at the site, covered with a simple black tarp.
Not just because transporting art is a risky business, and in conflict zones it is more dangerous to move a collection than to leave it alone. Such evacuations required official approval, which was nearly impossible to obtain once the invasion began. Several museums in Kherson have come under attack as Ukraine attempts to retake the city from Russian occupation and were ready to move their collections to a safer location, but were unable to obtain the necessary signatures. I didn’t.
“I think they’ve been abandoned,” Metelsky said when asked about the dilemma facing museum directors. “There were no orders, no instructions on what to do. And they couldn’t make the decisions themselves. And now these places are either occupied or destroyed.”
In the absence of a central plan, Ukrainian cultural figures relied on horizontal connections. In Lviv, it meant leveraging links with Polish institutions across borders.
Lilya Onishchenko, head of the Lviv City Council’s Historic Environmental Protection Department, contacted colleagues in Poland to search for hundreds of water-spray fire extinguishers, essential for protecting countless wooden churches in the Lviv region. I was. Flame-retardant blankets were also a key issue. The city’s monuments are now wrapped in protective materials sent from Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz and other Polish cities. (Some valuable monuments are also surrounded by cages or scaffolding so that if a blast shatters them, the fragments remain together.
“I don’t understand that such a thing is possible in the 21st century, especially when the library burned down in Mariupol,” said Ms. Onishchenko. She has spent her whole life preserving culture, but she takes it all very personally. “You give birth to children and raise them,” she said.
“It’s the same with cultural heritage. You work on it, you restore it, you work on it with great detail, with love. And it’s gone in one missile.”
Others in Lviv turned to the US-Ukrainian diaspora. The Cultural Heritage Relief Center partnered with the Foundation to Preserve Ukrainian Sacral Art, a Washington nonprofit organization, to provide part of the initial funding to transport the boxes and forms.
Two Ukrainian-speaking conservators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — one Ukrainian and one Polish — show how to properly wrap the painting (using cotton tape between the surface and the plastic) and how to transport it safely. (Both hands on the sides of the frame, not the top).
One of the commitments of Lviv’s on-the-fly conservationists is that no one should be trampled like they once were. “We understand that experience in the field of heritage preservation is invaluable to the global community,” said Šchulko, standing in front of his organization’s accumulated cardboard boxes. increase.
“War crystallized everything, brightened everything,” Shchurko continued. “We have always understood and communicated that our heritage is precious. But a sense of how important and valuable it is to us: this sense comes only with loss. increase.”
Oleh Chuprynski contributed a report from Lviv.
