Ukrainians fear erasure of their culture as Russian bombs destroy heritage sites

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About 45 minutes’ drive north from Kyiv along the M01 highway, the evidence of war suddenly appears. The carcasses of wrecked gas stations, burnt and bombed-out warehouses and factories, including a Coca-Cola plant, litter each side of the highway. The first wrecked structure along the way more or less marks the southern terminus of the Russian convoy that was bent on entering the capital.

Further north, toward Chernihiv, one of the first big cities attacked by the invasion force, the ruins of a curious building come into view. It’s the House of Culture of Ivanivka, a large, handsome building dating from the 1950s that was constructed in pleasing neo-classical style. The towering yellow and white façade is largely intact; the structure behind is completely gutted and exposed to the elements.

The building clearly has no military or industrial value, nor is it anywhere near one that does, leading to speculation that it was targeted for erasure – a victim of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s apparent campaign to destroy Ukraine’s identity. “The Russians do not recognize the existence of Ukrainian culture,” Oleksandr Tkachenko, Ukraine’s Minister of Culture and Information Policy, told The Globe and Mail. “They want to literally destroy the fact of the existence of the Ukrainian nation.”

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THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN;

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THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN;

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THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP CONTRIBUTORS

UNESCO, the UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, has listed 238 “verified” cultural sites – churches, monuments, libraries, museums, historic buildings – that were destroyed or damaged between the start of the invasion and Feb. 1 this year.

Mr. Tkachenko puts the number considerably higher, at 1,200, most of which have not been verified yet by UNESCO. Like many Ukrainians, he believes some of the attacks were deliberate, though others were clearly military accidents: missiles, bombs and drones gone astray in the fog of war.

Whether or not the attacks were deliberate does not change the facts on the ground. The cultural fabric of Ukraine has taken a tremendous and cruel hit, the greatest toll of this kind on European soil since the Second World War.

Reports arrive virtually every day of more wounds inflicted on the country’s artistic and architectural treasures, and looting of museums and galleries in Russian-occupied territories is said to be rampant.

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The future restoration bill is climbing relentlessly, though some sites are beyond repair. Mr. Tkachenko said, “We need US$3-billion to US$5-billion for reconstruction and to renew cultural activity.”

UNESCO is wary to put a price on the restoration work because the war is continuing and thorough damage assessments of many of the sites, which is being funded by Canada and other UNESCO member states, have yet to be done.

“It’s too early to tell,” said Krista Pikkat, UNESCO’s Director of Culture in Emergencies. “We really have just captured a snapshot of the damage.”

Upon entering Chernihiv, which had a pre-war population of 285,000, the evidence of cultural and non-cultural destruction is palpable and ubiquitous. The city, which is about 90 kilometres southwest of the Russian border, came under attack on Feb. 25, and was encircled by Russian troops and bombarded for 39 days, as if it were the victim of a Medieval siege. At least 700 soldiers and civilians died, though the casualties could be far higher – the rubble has yet to give up all its dead.

The most jarring feature in the vast and charming Krasna Square, in the heart of the city, is the boarded-up Chernihiv Regional Youth Centre.

The façade of the low-lying building, its entrance supported by a muscular stretch of white Doric columns, is obviously damaged though not entirely mutilated. But the top, sides and rear of the building are wrecked and heaps of stone, brick, concrete and twisted metal lie everywhere; some of the debris surrounds an enormous bomb crater.

“I loved this building so much,” Tatiana Mishuk, 62, the centre’s administrator, said as she walked through the gutted interior on a cold afternoon a week ago. “I cried after it was attacked. This building was part of my life, part of all our lives.”

The centre has had several incarnations since it was built in 1939. It began life as the Shchors cinema and was almost completely destroyed by the Germans in the Second World War. It was rebuilt and, in 1947, was the site of war crimes trials for German and Hungarian prisoners of war. In later years, it emerged as the city’s cultural centre for youth, combining spaces for cinema – it had three screening halls – music, dance, art exhibits, education and other social endeavours.

The locals remember it as the place where they, as teenagers, met their dates. Soviet heroes of the war were honoured in the building at various times, making it, in effect, a Russian cultural centre as well as a Ukrainian one. “We would salute the veterans when we were kids in the ‘Red’ cinema hall,” said Ms. Mishuk.

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On Feb. 27, three days after the start of the invasion, Ms. Mishuk, who had worked in the building for 22 years, left for home at 5 p.m., walking. About 40 minutes later, she heard explosions and knew her beloved youth centre was being bombed to rubble. “My first reaction was to run there, but I was stopped because of the shelling,” she said.

Miraculously, no one was killed or injured in the attack. During her recent visit to the centre, she found bits of the building’s romantic past strewn among the ruins. Still intact was a yellow popcorn vending machine twice the size of a fridge, with the wording, in English, “Popcorn is healthy high fibre, low in calories” stencilled on the front. Near it was a bulky 1970s film projector that had been built in Czechoslovakia. Shoes and boots were scattered here and there. Some of the rooms upstairs were dark, empty and wet, the wall cladding burnt away, giving them a haunted feeling.

Ms. Mishuk said she doesn’t know if the building was destroyed on purpose. She hopes a sponsor will pay for a historically sympathetic reconstruction, though is not expecting work to start any time soon.

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Some of the smaller cultural sites have already been repaired in an effort to give a semblance of normal life among the ruins. In early March, the church of St. Theodosius of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, just outside of Chernihiv, was hit by two Russian rockets and one artillery shell. The dome and the bell tower collapsed and fires ravaged the interior.

The local community came together and largely rebuilt the church. “At first, I was praying under open skies because we had no roof,” said Father Oleksandr, the church priest. “I remember doing a service in the summer and it was raining on us inside.”

The church kept a grim souvenir of the attack. The two-metre grey fuselage of a Russian rocket, minus its warhead, lies behind the church, next to some gravestones. It was probably launched by a BM-30 Smerch multiplerocket launcher vehicle, which is widely used by the Russians, its weapons not known for their accuracy.

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Most of the cultural sites have not been repaired. Many of them lie in occupied territories, putting them out of range of Ukraine government and UNESCO inspectors. Some have been completely destroyed. Worse, some appear to have been looted, their art collections carted away, or wrecked and abandoned after they were looted.

Kherson, the southern Ukraine city with a pre-war population of 285,000, is the most infamous example of wholesale looting.

The Russians are known to have removed thousands of works of art from the Kherson Art Museum (also known as the Kherson Regional Art Museum) shortly before Ukrainian forces regained control of the city in early November. The art was stuffed carelessly into trucks and buses and carted off to nearby Crimea, which was annexed by Moscow in 2014. UNESCO officials have called the looting and trafficking of art “the hidden part of the cultural destruction of Ukraine.”

While it appears that much of the looted art will be sent to museums in Russia, UNESCO has no doubt that corrupt Russian military brass will try to sell some of the precious smaller objects – coins, religious icons, manuscripts – in the black market. UNESCO is trying to train border guards in Poland, Romania and other European countries to spot trafficked art. “The biggest art market is no doubt Europe,” said Ms. Pikkat.

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While the cultural destruction and looting continue, Ukraine can claim at least one victory. In late January, UNESCO added the historic centre of the southern port of Odesa – “the pearl of the Black Sea” – to its World Heritage list, making it the eighth such site in Ukraine. The UN agency immediately classified Odesa as “in danger” because of the war. UNESCO and Ukraine hope that the city’s inclusion will discourage Russia from shelling the city again, though the designation would not prevent it. But an attack by a UNESCO member on a UNESCO heritage site would certainly heap international opprobrium on the Kremlin.

Mr. Tkachenko, the culture minister, was at the Paris meetings before the heritage committee vote and said that Russia repeatedly tried to kill the Odesa vote. He said at one point, a Russian representative on the UNESCO heritage committee stood up and sang a patriotic Russian song about Odesa. Mr. Tkachenko said he refused to shake the hands of the Russian delegates.

Every Ukrainian museum went into panic mode after the start of the invasion almost a year ago, and some have been the site of quiet acts of heroism.

In central Kyiv on Oct. 10, Russian missiles damaged four of the five museums on or near the graceful Taras Shevchenko Park. One of them was the fairly small Khanenko Museum, housed in an elegant mansion built in the late 1800s. It contains some of Ukraine’s finest works of European and Asian art, including a piece by the Dutch painter Jan Weenix – or at least did.

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In the days before Feb. 24, when it became probable that a Russian invasion was coming, the museum’s acting director, Yuliya Vaganova, loaded up the storage space with packing materials. When the invasion started, she and her small staff, made up of about 20 fairly elderly ladies, packed up the museum’s entire collection, working around the clock to exhaustion, and had it carted away to a secret location.

When the missile attack came, there was no art left in the museum, bar one Italian Baroque painting that was too big to be easily removed. It was left overhanging the main staircase, covered in a sheet of canvas. The building heaved during the missile attack, shattering all the front windows and the skylights, and the ladies went to work again to sweep up the glass and cover the window openings. “When you are in shock, you can do things very quickly,” Ms. Vaganova said. “Some of them kept working as they were crying.”

Chiara Dezzi Bardeshi, the UNESCO liaison officer, knows that UNESCO and Ukraine’s museum staff and cultural directors face an enormous amount of work to protect what’s left of the country’s artistic and cultural treasures. “Here, we face continuous damage,” she said. “We only have a partial view to date of the damages. It could be far greater than what we know.”

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