In early March, when the Russian army’s advance into Ukraine’s Zaporyjia region seemed inevitable, Natalia Cherguik headed west in a truck with a ton of paintings, weapons collections and 17th-century ceramics.
“We covered a thousand kilometers in five days. It was a horrible trip, we continued with planes passing over our heads without even knowing if they were Ukrainians”, recalls the 50-year-old woman, curator of the exhibition at the Khortitsia museum.
“The hardest part was convincing people at the checkpoints not to search the collections and let the truck pass as quickly as possible”, he says.
The museum island of Khortitsia, in the middle of the Dnieper River that flows through Zaporijia, was occupied since the 16th century by Ukrainian Cossacks, who made it their base until it was destroyed by Empress Catherine II of Russia in 1775.
There the first “Sich” of ZaporÃjia was born, a political regime that practiced direct democracy.
It is “a sacred place in the history of Ukraine”, Maksim Ostapenko, 51, who runs the museum created there, an important cultural center that houses dozens of historical objects found in archaeological research, told AFP.
A native of the region, Ostapenko joined the Ukrainian army at the start of the Russian invasion, like most of his colleagues. But that’s not why they abandoned the museum.
“In fact, we had drawn up an evacuation plan in 2014, after the annexation of Crimea” by Russia, explains Ostapenko. “We drew up a priority list of 100 works, the most valuable, that should be removed in case of danger.”
“Cultural heritage cannot be reconstituted. We are obliged to take precautions”, says the director.
As early as February 23, two days after a speech by Vladimir Putin that left little doubt about the future invasion, museum teams began dismantling the collections.
When Moscow launched its offensive the next day, they began to withdraw under Russian bombardment.
The Russian army was stopped some 40 kilometers south of Zaporijia and was unable to take Khortitsia, but three missiles landed on the island, without hitting the museum.
According to UNESCO, 175 cultural sites have been damaged in Ukraine since the start of the war. The country’s Ministry of Culture considers that around 100 museums and nearly 17,000 cultural heritage objects are located in the occupied territories.
