Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 2022 has included the wholesale destruction, damage and looting of Ukraine’s cultural heritage, including a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This intentional destruction is a loss not only for Ukraine but also for humankind. Ukrainian scientific communities need more resources to address these challenges. In response, Red Arch Cultural Heritage Law and Policy Research partnered with Lviv Polytechnic National University to initiate a program of preventive conservation to fund the digital scanning of eleven historic wooden churches in eastern Ukraine, some of which are very close to the war zone. The success of those initial efforts has led our team to expand on this initiative in 2024, and to launch separate initiatives that will strengthen conservation education and conservation science in Ukraine.
Frieze detail, Assembly Hall, Lviv Polytechnic National University. Photo credit: Mykola Bevz
Ukraine’s cultural heritage includes its stunning historic wooden churches or tserkvas, approximately 2000 of which are extant. These structures date from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries, with eight designated as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Many of these churches are in use today, and only a few are fully documented from an archival and architectural standpoint.
The Conservation Equipment Initiative aims to acquire necessary scientific instruments that will seed the Regional Art Conservation Laboratory, to be housed in the Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv, Ukraine.
Ukraine boasts numerous museums, one of the largest being the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv, western Ukraine, with over 150,000 holdings. Interest in Ukrainian art among museum specialists, art conservators, heritage protection specialists, art historians, and the general public is steadily growing. Exhibitions staged at the Ukrainian Museum in New York City, at the Wawel castle in Kraków, Poland, at the Vilnius gallery in Vilnius, Lithuania, as well as an upcoming exhibition of Ukrainian Secessionists scheduled for 2024 (Belvedere, Vienna) are bringing Ukrainian art to enthusiastic audiences eager to learn more about its outstanding artistic achievements.
Outdated equipment and the depletion of resources is hindering technical research on Ukrainian art as well as its conservation, protection, and display. Our contacts with Ukrainian scientists, museum directors, and heads of conservation training programs compel Red Arch to assist in the creation of a modern scientific conservation lab. The facilitation of such a lab also supports scientific authentication methods, and the dissemination of research by those with the expertise to perform it, but who lack the equipment to do so efficaciously. Over 230 smaller regional museums in western Ukraine alone are underserviced by lack of state-of-the-art conservation equipment. Nationally, there exists only one Fourier-transform infrared spectrometer (FTIR) devoted to art analysis.
