Valuable art still not evacuated from Sumy museums

Iryna Podolyak, a board member of the Coalition of Cultural Activists, shared this information in an interview with Radio Culture, as reported by Suspilne.

According to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's statement, Russia continues to concentrate its troops along the border with Sumy, putting local museums at risk. However, a significant number of valuable items have still not been evacuated.

As Podolyak pointed out, the Sumy Art Museum has already completed two stages of evacuation, relocating some exhibits and collections to safer locations, further from the border. However, paintings by Mykola Pymonenko, Hryhorii Havrylenko, Vasyl Krychevskyi, and statues by the French sculptor Aristide Croisy, as well as gravestones from the family of philanthropists Kharytonenko, which were initially buried in sandbags, are now exposed to the open air.

“We understand that during the first two stages of evacuation, parts of the Sumy Museum’s collections were evacuated, but how could it happen that works by Pymonenko, Havrylenko, and Krychevskyi were not evacuated by the third stage? We do not understand this,” she emphasized.

According to Podolyak, there are more than 15 museums in the Sumy region. This situation cannot be ignored any longer.

The Coalition of Cultural Activists has already sent a letter to the President and the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada. Some members of parliament have responded to the activists' call.

At the end of February, the Coalition of Cultural Activists published a letter calling on the Ministry of Culture to accelerate the evacuation of state museum collections from frontline regions of Ukraine. In response, the Ministry reported that evacuation measures had been carried out for 59 cultural institutions in Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Luhansk, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Poltava, Sumy, Kharkiv, Kherson, and Chernihiv regions. A total of 540,942 items have been evacuated.

At the same time, the Ministry is collecting information from museums located in frontline areas regarding their evacuation needs.