The stories of the staff of the museums of Melitopol and Mariupol reveal the gloomy decisions of the war and their impact on the cultural heritage of Ukraine after the invasion on February 24.
Director of the Melitopol Museum of History and Local Lore Leyla Ibragimova was one of the kidnapped by Russian troops in March. She told the New York Times how the invaders, along with a Russian-speaking man in a white lab coat under the barrel of a pistol, tried to force her to bring them to a Scythian gold treasury that was hidden.
Other historical artifacts were also hidden in boxes in the basement, and museum workers assumed that no one would find them. They refused to show the location of antiquities, but the occupiers still found them. The curator, whom Crimean Tatar activist Eskender Bariev identified as Galina Kucher, was released but abducted again and has not been seen since, according to The Art Newspaper.
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Ibragimova and Kucher proudly spoke about the Scythian gold collection when it was exhibited in 2017 and 2021:“ For the first time, what was found in Ukraine remained in Ukraine, ”Ibragimova said about gold items found during archeological excavations of mounds in Melitopol in 1954. “Before that, everything was sent to Moscow or Leningrad.”
Last week, it was also reported that among the stolen museum masterpieces were original works by Archip Kuindzhi, a Greek-born artist born in Mariupol in the 19th century. Mariupol City Council said that “more than 2,000 unique exhibits” were looted from city museums by “racists” – a common term that combines the words “Russian” and “fascist”, including the “Gospel of 1811, created specifically in Venice for the Greeks of Mariupol “.
