According to the Interfax-Ukraine Culture project, in honor of International Museum Day, the Ivan Honchar Museum opened part of its collection and shared the stories of five exhibits that have survived the disappearance of villages, the changing of eras, the loss of traditions, and even the memory of themselves, the museum’s press service told the agency.
“Each of these items is not just an object, but an experience that cannot be contained within a single human biography. They preserve the memory of an environment that has already disappeared and give us a chance to experience it,” says Oleksandra Storchai, a researcher at the Ivan Honchar Museum.
These are items created decades and centuries ago, which today have become not just museum exhibits, but tangible witnesses to vanished worlds.
Among the main exhibits are two embroidered shirts from Bakota—a village in Podillia that was flooded in 1981 during the construction of the Novodnistrovsk Hydroelectric Power Plant. Today, this place is called the “Ukrainian Atlantis.”
The museum emphasizes that these shirts serve as a memory of the lives of people who were forced to leave their homes along with the village, which disappeared forever under the water.
The collection also features balamuty—traditional necklaces made of fossilized mother-of-pearl. According to legend, deposits of this material in Ukraine were exhausted by the end of the 19th century, so today it is virtually impossible to recreate such jewelry.
Another exhibit is a salba, a chest ornament covered with coins from various countries and eras. It combines coins from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the United States, and Canada, some of which date back to the 18th century.
Separately, the museum displayed a Volyn shirt with a restrained aesthetic and complex embroidery techniques, as well as one of the oldest shirts in the collection—featuring a slanted sleeve. Such a cut was already considered outdated by the early 20th century.
The museum notes that all these items have one thing in common—they have outlived their owners, the eras, and the environments in which they were created, yet they continue to preserve the memory of them.
The Ivan Honchar Museum is one of Ukraine’s key museums dedicated to the preservation and study of Ukraine’s traditional culture and ethnographic heritage.
https://interfax.com.ua/news/culture/1168579.html
