Consider a grand museum in your town or city. Think of your favourite exhibits within it. When you see them, you sense the ongoing story of your country's history and feel a sense of belonging.
Now, picture an intruder entering and stealing or damaging these exhibits. You feel the agony of loss because someone has taken away a piece of who you are, your identity - something that connects you to your roots.
That’s what millions of Ukrainians are experiencing due to the Russian aggression. The Russians have stolen tens of thousands of pieces of cultural treasures from Ukrainian museums, cathedrals, and libraries.
According to The New York Times, the looting of Ukrainian museums by the Russian military has become the largest theft of art objects since WWII.
The accounts from Kherson and Mariupol are the most vivid. For four days before Kherson was liberated, Russian invaders looted the Kherson Art Museum. Only from this museum have 15 thousand items been stolen, according to preliminary data.
The Kherson Local History Museum was not spared. The Russians stole coins, weapons, Sarmatian jewellery, antique furniture, paintings, and icons from there.
They damaged the Mariupol Local History Museum and the Art Museum in Mariupol. More than 2,000 items were stolen, including ancient icons, a Torah manuscript, a 200-year-old Bible, and sketches by Arkhip Kuindzhi and Ivan Aivazovsky. And these are just the confirmed cases.
These are examples of just two cities. The scale of this crime is larger than one can imagine, especially given that access to accurate data from occupied territories is limited.
And so, Russia is trying to deprive Ukrainians of their cultural heritage, and, their history and identity. These actions are yet another example of Russian war crimes. This is cultural genocide.
Ukrainians don’t want their national treasures to be erased from national memory. Civil society takes innovative steps to recover what was stolen and retain in memory what is lost forever. The Museum of Stolen Art is a perfect example.
UkraineWorld spoke with Olena Zenchenko, the museum curator, about the project's values, the challenges it faces, and plans for the future.
The Museum of Stolen Art is a multimedia project that provides visitors with an online 3D tour of the hall that houses digital copies of 15 artworks stolen from Mariupol by Russian invaders.
Currently, the prototype of the museum has been launched, which is why the number of artworks is limited. However, the creators of the project, the Linza Agency team, have ambitious plans.
By visiting the project's website, you will be taken to a metaverse where you can interact with the artworks as if you were in a real museum.
You are immersed in a unique atmosphere that not only informs you about the stolen or destroyed artworks but also gives you a painful sense of the tragedy Russia brought to Ukraine.
One of the museum's central concepts is to document Russia's crimes against Ukrainian culture
. This aspect of war crimes, which Ukraine has become a victim of, receives insufficient attention amid all the horrifying news about atrocities against people.
However, cultural heritage is a part of Ukrainian identity, and by depriving Ukrainians of it, Russia deprives us of our face and creates historical myths about the "big motherland," which may have lasting repercussions in terms of self-identification for future generations. Ukraine is also fighting for the preservation of its culture.
The project aims to highlight an aspect that does not always resonate in the hearts and minds of foreigners: Russia is waging war not for territories, but for the annihilation of everything Ukrainian in order to leave no trace of the Ukrainian nation on earth.
The authors of the project hope to instil empathy in those who are far removed from the war context by providing visitors to the museum with an immersive experience.
The idea of the museum was born when the authors of the project Olena Zenchenko and Les Yakymchuk were en route to the south of the Mykolaiv region to fulfill their volunteer mission.
It was October 2022, shortly before Kherson was liberated. At that time the news about the looting of Kherson museums appeared.
Olena and Les pondered what a creative community could do to raise awareness of the crime against Ukrainian culture and preserve the memory of lost treasures. They also considered a project that would aid in recovering what had been stolen.
Both of them had studied in the US before the full-scale invasion started and they decided to come back to Ukraine. Having knowledge about VR and metaverse they decided to combine their skills to create something that would draw attention - the Museum of Stolen Art.
It is a volunteer project, so no one funded the initiative. That is why the process of prototype creation took much time. The team used OSINT methods to identify the items that were stolen - a challenging task taking into account the scarcity of information available.
The project's creators consider stolen art to include not only items from museums but also lost architectural landmarks. Currently, the organisation Mariupol Reborn is interested in working with the museum in order to virtually recreate the city's historical sites, as they have a large amount of materials that can be used.
There are plans to expand the museum. The creation of the Kherson Hall is next in turn. Since the city is de-occupied there’s a large amount of information available.
The team doesn’t want to focus solely on the museums of the city. They want to cover the objects damaged as a result of the Kakhovka Dam disaster.
For example, they want to recreate with the help of 3D artists the house of a prominent Ukrainian artist Polina Rayko, destroyed because of the disaster.
The creators see the museum as a large-scale project that will not be limited to the exhibitions of arts lost in Mariupol or Kherson, the cases that gained the most media coverage. There are cultural losses in smaller towns and villages that were previously occupied or are under occupation.
E.g. a community of people who escaped from occupied Melitopol wants to create a hall devoted to the treasures of their town. There is a big collection of archaeological items from the Scythian period in Melitopol. However, no one knows what happened to it, whether destroyed or stolen.
Olena suggested employing new methods to present museum items. When it comes to complex objects, such as a collection of Mariupol coins, it just makes sense to show them together rather than separately but reconceptualize them as a new object.
As a result, the museum aims to do more than just document the cases. It is a broader rethinking and memorialization of culture and history.
The museum’s team is looking for funding opportunities to create new rooms and develop the project so that the process can be completed faster and more effectively.
The project also needs more 3D artists from all over the world to recreate the lost pieces of Ukrainian and, in border terms, world cultural heritage.
