Protecting Ukraine's cultural heritage from destruction in 2022 war.

beautiful Kul Sharif Mosque
located within Kazan's Kremlin/historical citadel. 

Kazan Palace

UNESCO is the United Nations agency overseeing cultural heritage sites across the world. In 2019, Russia was elected to the committee for a term. At the last World Heritage Committee’s sum­m­it in 2021, the Rus­sian Federation was selected to host the 2022 conference, in Kazan.

The Spasskaya Tower is the main entrance to Kazan's best attraction: its Kremlin. It's located on the land side, just behind the Musa Jalil mon­ument. The whitewashed main tower, with a clock in the middle, pro­vides entran­ce to the whole Krem­lin via the arched pedestrian access, and inside is a fine looking Kul Sharif Mosque. A perfect choice!  

But following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the UNESCO faced pressure from Eu­­ropean groups to relocate the meet­ing scheduled for Ka­zan which was to run from 19-30th June. So could the location of the 2022 meeting be changed, asked mem­bers of the Comm­ittee composed of 21 member states el­ec­ted from the 194 countries.

In early March, as the Russian-Ukrainian war worsened, UNESCO was al­ready anxious about threats to cultural her­itage sites across Ukr­aine. UNESCO has already reported the sites that have been damaged: 29 religious sites, 16 hist­oric buildings, 4 museums and 4 monuments

So UNESCO questioned Ukrainian museum officials re safe­guarding cultural prop­erty at risk. To track the threats to Ukraine’s cultural heritage, UNESCO worked with Artists at Risk, a global non-profit that aided artists in conflict zones. However what was ironic was that Uk­raine called for the next World Heritage Commit­tee meeting to be mov­ed to Lviv in Western Ukraine. I would not risk a war zone! 

Russia and Ukraine

Lviv is marked in green

UNESCO asked Ukrainian powers to mark cultural sites and monuments with the distinctive Blue Shield emblem of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property. This Convention, which Russia and Uk­r­aine both signed, was to protect cultural prop­erties from delib­erate or accid­ental damages during armed conflict!

Before the current war Ukraine already had 7 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, including Lviv’s Historic City Cent­re, Kyiv’s Saint-Sophia Cathedral and Kyiv’s Pechersk Lavra Monastery. These were seen as a prior­ity, as was Ch­er­nihiv’s historic cen­t­re which was waiting for world heritage status before the war started.

The UN agency confirmed that 53 histor­ical sites, religious buildings and museums were damaged during the war. The agency specif­ied the crimes: destroying a local history museum in Kyiv, bombing a Mariupol theatre and damaging a Holocaust memorial in Kh­ar­k­iv in eastern Ukraine. The mayor of  Ch­er­nihiv accused Rus­sian forces of in­ten­sifying their bombardment of his city. For my family the most important damaged site was Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Centre in Kyiv, where thousands of Ukrainian Jews were ext­erminated by the Nazis & their Ukrainian collaborators. 

Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, Yasnohorodka near Kyiv
destroyed by heavy-calibre machine gun. BBC

Some cultural build­ings will be rebuilt after the war, while others were totally destroy­ed. UNESCO experts will cont­inue to ver­ify each report and will add other sites to this list if bomb­ing cont­in­ues. La­ter UNESCO will meet Ukrain­ian cultural prof­ess­ion­als, World Herit­age Site managers and museum dir­ec­tors, to det­er­mine what aid is needed.

Mariupol Theatre, before and after being bombed
9News

A UNESCO rep­ told Art Newspaper that there were no plans in place to relocate the session from Kazan. So 30+ cul­tural heritage academics & professionals sent a letter to UNESCO, urging them to change its deplorable plan for the World Heritage Committee. Read the UNESCO page to see that UNESCO has indeed opted to postpone the event indefinitely.

 

Art critic Waldemar Januszczak recently visited Ukraine to dis­cover how the nat­ional art was being saved from Russian bombs. It started at a London meeting of 10 of Poland’s most important museum directors. Januszczak asked the Polish directors if they knew what was happening to Ukraine’s art and to Lviv’s museums. Weeks earlier, the dir­ector of the National Museum in Poznan had driven a truck to Ukr­aine, to help the Ukrainians by hiding their art.

When Januszczak was driven to Lviv, giant billboards constantly loomed up, emblazoned with stirring mottos: “Be ready to join the army and save Ukraine”. Lviv is a beautiful cobbled, gothic city, the archit­ect­ure having a unique appeal. He visited the Lviv National Art Gall­ery, the largest museum in Ukraine, because many of the nation’s imp­ortant art treasures had been sent there for safekeeping.

Taking art works into secure hiding places

robbreport
 
The Director was annoyed that Westerners forgot that the war with the Russians started in 2014 in Crimea - the present war was just anoth­er episode. So Ukraine had pl­enty of time to prepare plans for ensur­ing the safety of its national art. Yes, many of the art treasures from Kyiv, Kharkiv and Dnipro came to Lviv. But was there more art still waiting?

The stained glass of Lviv’s cathedral was wrapped in shiny protective sheets, as were the statues outside the church. Lviv’s magnific­ent opera house became a poster site for heroic imagery because, in times of war, art matters more.

The director drove Januszczak out of Lviv to a a disused monas­tery where the museum kept some of its art. He arrived at a crumbling building surrounded by a high wall and they marched him through many corridors jam-packed with thou­s­ands of icons and baroque church sculptures, thrown away by Soviet sol­diers in Ukraine in 1939!