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Lesia Ukrainka Museum in Yalta

The memorial museum of Lesia Ukrainka in Yalta is one of the main centers of Ukrainian culture, scholarly and educational work in Crimea, founded in the estate of the merchant Lishchynska (Katerynynska St., 8), where the poetess lived in 1897–1898.

Overview

The initiative to honor the memory of Lesia Ukrainka and to create her memorial museum in Yalta was launched in the 1920s by scholar Valentyn Otamanovskyi with the assistance of Pavlo Horyanskyi. In the 1970s, an active Ukrainian community (Mykola Okhrimenko, Oleksii Nyrko, Ostap Kindrachuk, Oleksandr Yanush, Tetiana Tsymbal) joined the effort to restore the memory of the poetess, and thanks to their efforts a monument and a memorial plaque were erected in 1972.

Despite Soviet restrictions (the opening in 1976 of the "Museum of Pre-revolutionary Progressive russian and Ukrainian Culture"), in 1991, on the 120th anniversary of the writer, the exhibition "Lesia Ukrainka and Crimea" was opened, which on 10 September 1993 received the official status of the "Lesia Ukrainka Museum" as a department of the Yalta Historical and Literary Museum. By the 10th anniversary of Ukraine's independence (2001), with the support of the Renaissance (Vidrodzhennia) Foundation, a new exhibition "Lomykamin" (Breakstone) was opened.

Until 2014, the museum served as a key Ukrainian-studies center of the Southern Coast of Crimea: associated with it were the first Ukrainian school of Yalta, a library, the "Seven Muses" amateur theater, and the festivals "Lesia's Autumn" and competitions "Crimean Pleiades" and recitation contests were held. After the russian occupation of Crimea in 2014, the museum found itself under threat of closure and liquidation: the building was closed under the pretext of "emergency condition" and "major repairs", the exhibition was dismantled and later reduced to two display cases in a foreign exhibition, and the museum premises became an object of budgetary manipulations by the occupation administration.

Key Details / Subtopics

  • History of the building and the initiatives of the 1920s and 1970s: The house was built in 1889 as a wing of the private estate of the merchant Lishchynska on Litkensa St. (now Katerynynska St., 8). In autumn 1925 it was inspected by Valentyn Otamanovskyi (director of the Vinnytsia branch of the VBU) with the help of Pavlo Horyanskyi, petitioning for the preservation of the memorial sites of Lesia Ukrainka and Stepan Rudanskyi. At the beginning of the 1970s, an initiative group emerged with the participation of Mykola Okhrimenko (a student of the poetess), the kobzar singers Oleksii Nyrko and Ostap Kindrachuk; in 1972 a monument to Lesia Ukrainka was erected.
  • The "Lomykamin" (Breakstone) exhibition (2001): The main museum concept, developed by Professor Svitlana Kocherha with the support of the Renaissance Foundation. The metaphor "lomykamin" (thus the poetess named the mountain edelweiss) symbolized her unbreakable role in Ukrainian culture. The collections contained lifetime editions, everyday objects of the Kosach family, photographs, ethnographic materials, and works of folk and applied art.
  • A center of Ukrainian life in Yalta: The museum served as a scholarly and educational center — here operated a Sunday school and the first Ukrainian school of the city, lectures of the Crimean Humanitarian Institute were held, meetings of the VUT "Prosvita", the Union of Ukrainian Women, the "Crimean Kutia" club, performances of the "Seven Muses" theater, and the annual "Lesia's Autumn" festival.
  • The repair problem and emergency condition (before 2014): The building had not undergone major repairs for over 20 years (since the mid-1980s). Destructive winter storms and frosts of 2012 worsened the condition of the roof, facades, and floor structures. Resolutions of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine (2010) regarding the repair of the museum remained unfulfilled by central government structures.
  • Repressive policy of the occupation authorities (after 2014): Since 2016, the museum has been closed to visitors under the pretext of plaster collapse. The exhibition was removed, and by 2018 only two display cases remained of the memorial complex in a general city exhibition. The occupation "authorities" (A. Rostenko, L. Kovalchuk, O. Chelpanov) repeatedly allocated funds only for reworking the design and estimate documentation (from 5 to 130 million rubles), imitating restoration work. The founders and the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine qualified this as an attempt to push out Ukrainian heritage and a possible re-profiling into a "museum of russian culture".

Controversies and Open Questions

  • Representatives of the occupation administration of Yalta (L. Kovalchuk, Yu. Rudnyk) claimed that the closure of the museum was a temporary safety measure due to the destruction of plaster, and that restoration was included in the russian federal Target Program. In contrast, the founder of the museum Svitlana Kocherha, pro-Ukrainian activists, and the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine emphasized the deliberate destruction of the museum, the absence of real construction work, and the threat of a raider seizure of the building or its re-conceptualization in favor of rf propaganda myths.
  • The fate of the lifetime editions of Lesia Ukrainka's works, the unique national clothing, and everyday objects of her family after the removal of the exhibition in 2016 remains unknown.