This article was first published by News of Canada.
A month after the Russian army invaded Ukraine, photographer Roman Metelskiy stood on the platform of the domed Art Nouveau train station in this western city, watching trains full of women and children evacuating from the east. But he was waiting for a carriage from the other direction. This one, from the west, was full of Bubble Wrap.
Few Ukrainian cultural institutions had prepared for a large-scale invasion. Museums, churches, castles, and libraries had no materials or guidelines for preserving the country’s valuable art.
“We had to start all over again,” said Mr. Metelskiy. “We asked for packaging material. For financial support. For advice on how to store and pack things.”
So with the government at war, he and other art professionals formed an ad hoc conservation committee, the Center to Rescue Cultural Heritage, over a cup of coffee in early March. (In this Habsburg city, Mr. Metelskiy explained, “everything happens over coffee.”)
“We were quite surprised,” said Mr. Metelskiy. “We thought those instructions already existed.”
Ivan Shchurko, a member of Lviv’s regional parliament who attended the coffee meeting that first day, recalled that they were scared and disoriented as they sought help. “We were looking for people with the same interests, the same values,” he said.
They contacted a dozen Polish museums and palaces and on March 27 a train arrived from Warsaw, loaded with cardboard boxes and bags of Styrofoam beads. On April 4, another emergency shipment with packing material and protective gloves arrived from Norway and Denmark. Other supplies came from libraries in Germany, Latvia, and Estonia, and museums in Britain and Slovenia.
Teams in Lviv put the packing materials in vans or in the back of their cars and transported the supplies across the country to vulnerable institutions in Chernihiv, Dnipro, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia. In June, Mr. Shchurko and Mr. Metelskiy mountains of foam core boards and packs of plastic film that filled the lobby of a university library: humanitarian aid of a more cultural nature.
“In times of war, there are two irreversible losses: people and our culture,” Metelskiy said. “The rest can be rebuilt.”
As the Ukrainian military ramps up its counter-offensive in the east this summer, heritage specialists in the west are engaged in a related struggle: preserving Ukrainian monuments, museums, historical collections and religious sites. The Russian invasion is a culture war at its core, and heritage sites have been damaged by both errant shelling and targeted destruction. Ukraine has accused Russian-led forces of looting in the occupied cities of Mariupol and Melitopol. Regional museums outside the capital Kiev and the northeastern city of Kharkov have been burned to their foundations.
But where the Ukrainian soldiers relied on a central command structure, the civilian army of scholars, curators, archivists and architects say they have had little guidance.
Officials in Kiev and in regional governments have certainly taken steps to keep the country’s heritage intact. The national Ministry of Culture has organized workshops, won pledges from international partners and maintained a public database of damaged and destroyed monuments for future legal claims.
“Before the large-scale war, we were not ready for such barbaric action, although the ministry did our best to protect our cultural sites,” Kateryna Chuyeva, a deputy culture minister, said at a March briefing on the destruction of Churches. and Historical Archives of Ukraine. “But what we are seeing now in western Ukraine is that people are very involved in defending and protecting cultural sites.”
The ministry has been sparing in detailing the number of collections it has helped evacuate, citing wartime necessity. But interviews with museum directors and other heritage leaders in Lviv and Kiev shared a common refrain: if you wanted practical supplies, you had to find them yourself.
“Our officials who cut us off and leave the cultural sphere with minimal resources make us work even more,” said Mr. Metelskiy.
So by coordinating through WhatsApp groups and WeTransfer files, and raising money on crowdfunding platforms, they’ve made significant strides in preserving endangered icons and works of art — and they’ve largely done it themselves.
“It’s very difficult, but it’s a great opportunity to help my colleagues,” said Olha Honchar, the 29-year-old director of the Territory of Terror Memorial Museum, which documents the city’s Nazi and Soviet past. “From the first day of the war, we understood that the Lviv region would become a shelter and that the Lviv museums would be intermediaries with donor countries.”
Updated: Aug 8, 2022, 2:22 PM ET
In early March, Ms Honchar founded a non-profit organization that has provided financial support to more than 750 museum staff in eastern and southern Ukraine. The payments, usually under $100 and delivered via the smartphone app, have helped keep art institution employees afloat while their salaries remain unpaid.
While Ukrainian refugees were welcomed by European cultural institutions, those who stayed behind needed immediate humanitarian assistance that these arts institutions were ill-willing to provide. Foreign donors reached out — but they wanted control over spending that people caught up in war couldn’t afford.
“We need packing material,” said Mrs. Honchar. “But we also need to help people who work with these packaging materials. We must support the human potential of culture in Ukraine.”
Lviv, which passed from Austrian to Polish to Soviet control in the 20th century, has put its heritage in jeopardy before. The Nazis looted the city’s art collections during World War II; a Dürer drawing now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington was kept in a library in Lviv until 1941. After World War II, the Soviet authorities suppressed not only abstract art, but also art with Ukrainian nationalist themes and religious art – including the Baroque statues of Johann Georg Pinsel, the city’s foremost Habsburg-era artist.
Now Pinsel’s screw-twist saints on the facade of St. George’s Cathedral in Lviv are shrouded in gray plastic bags wrapped with twine and duct tape. Asked about those who threatened the cathedral’s artwork, Roman Kravchyk, the archpriest, fingered the jeweled crucifix around his neck and muttered, “May God have mercy on their souls.”
Ms Honchar and her Lviv colleagues have helped to evacuate collections from a few smaller, regional museums to the relative safety of western Ukraine. A few institutions in Kharkov and Chernihiv also managed to move parts of their collections here. At least one museum in Odessa had the foresight to stage a major touring exhibition in January to get rid of its holdings.
The Lviv National Art Gallery, the largest art museum in the country, with more than a dozen branches in the city and the surrounding region, made only perfunctory preparations for the invasion. Few initially thought the war would reach that far west, but one rocket landed about 200 yards from one of the institution’s castles, with a fragile collection of Chinese and Japanese ceramics on the grounds.
Vasyl Mytsko, a senior official at the museum, shrouded the evacuations with a dark optimism born of Ukraine’s tumultuous history. “In the Ukrainian language,” he said during an air raid siren, “we have a saying: we were unlucky, so misfortune helped us.”
The museum’s belongings are safe for now. The prices of the painting collection have been moved to various secret locations. But many of Pinsel’s gilded statues are still on the property, swathed in simple black sails.
Transporting art is a risky business, and not just because in a war zone it can be more dangerous to move a collection than to leave it standing. Such evacuations require official approval, which was nearly impossible to obtain once the invasion began. Several museums in Kherson, now under attack as Ukraine tries to recapture the city from Russian occupation, were ready to move their collections to safer grounds, but were unable to obtain the necessary signatures.
“They were abandoned, I would say,” said Mr. Metelskiy, when asked about the dilemmas facing museum directors. “There were no orders, no directions as to what to do. And they couldn’t make up their own mind because if they did, and something went wrong, they’d be criminally liable. And now these places are occupied or destroyed.”
Lacking central planning, Ukraine’s cultural figures relied on horizontal connections. In Lviv this meant exploiting contacts with institutions across the border, in Poland.
Liliya Onyshchenko, head of the Lviv City Council’s Historical Environmental Protection Department, reached out to Polish colleagues in search of hundreds of water-spraying fire extinguishers, essential protection for the countless wooden churches in the Lviv region. Flame retardant blankets were another critical question; monuments in the city are now wrapped in protective material shipped from Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz and other Polish cities. (Some valuable monuments are also surrounded by cages or scaffolding, so that the pieces stay together when a blast wave shatters them.)
“It’s incomprehensible that something like this is possible in the 21st century, especially when the library in Mariupol was burned down,” said Ms. Onyshchenko. She has spent her entire life in cultural preservation and takes it all very personally. ‘You bear and raise a son,’ she said, ‘and then a barbarian comes and takes your child away in one day.
“It is the same with cultural heritage. You work on it, restore it, do it in the smallest details, with love. And then a rocket and it’s gone.”
Others in Lviv have looked at the United States and the Ukrainian diaspora. The Center to Rescue Cultural Heritage partnered with a Washington-based nonprofit called the Foundation to Preserve Ukraine’s Sacred Arts, which provided some of the initial funding for the transportation of boxes and foam.
Two Ukrainian-speaking restorers from the Metropolitan Museum of Art – one Ukrainian, one Polish – have recorded videos on how to properly wrap a painting (with cotton tape between the face and the plastic) and how to carry it safely ( with your hands on the sides of the frame, never the top).
One of the pledges of Lviv’s on-the-fly conservationists is that no one should be caught as flat-footed as they were. “We also understand that our heritage preservation experience will be invaluable to the global community,” said Mr. Shchurko, standing in front of his organization’s collected cardboard boxes.
“The war has crystallized everything, it has made everything clearer,” Mr. Shchurko continued. “We have always understood and said that our heritage is valuable. But the feeling of how important and valuable it is to us: this feeling only comes with losses.”
Oleh Chuprynski contributed to reporting from Lviv.
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