Last Thursday, Prime Minister Valery Pustovoitenko called some 1,500 company executives to a civil defense camp near the town of Pereyaslav-Khmelnytsky to pressure the executives to sign pledges to pay their overdue taxes. While there, he also dropped by one of the town's many dilapidated museums and heard the staff's pleas to help rescue it from creeping ruin.
Having recently visited the town, I could not help but conclude that the museum staff need to save themselves.
Pereyaslav-Khmelnytsky, an hour's drive from Kyiv, is one of the most important historical sites in Ukraine. It has six museums holding some of the crown jewels of Ukraine. Today these historical sites urgently need money for repairs and development. They have been abandoned by the government along with their unpaid staffs.
The problem is not only that there is not enough money to print a guide or a map. There is not any will, either on the part of the government or the people in charge of the historical sites, to attract tourists to the sites. There is a lack of self-initiative, drive and determination to save the sites from further deterioration and the employees from poverty. The sites teach more about the sad state of the tourist industry in Ukraine than they do about Ukraine's history.
From the 10th to the 13th centuries, Pereyaslav rivaled Kyiv for power, glory and wealth. Within its medieval walls it had six grand churches. After its destruction in the 13th century by invading armies, Pereyaslav revived in the 16th to 18th centuries as a Cossack capital, bishopric and center of higher education.
St. Michael's Monastery, built in 1646-1666, is the older of the two monasteries in Pereyaslav. Today its church is an ethnographic museum holding a unique and large collection of Ukrainian embroidered costumes. Adjoining the church is a museum housing the foundations and artifacts of the medieval St. Michael's Cathedral. On the Sunday that I and two friends visited St Michael's, the ethnographic museum was closed to visitors, though it was open according to its official schedule. And the staff told us that the museum is usually shut on Wednesdays and Thursdays as well. After some prodding, they did let us into the museum with the medieval foundations and artifacts.
Not far from St Michael's, stands the church of Borys and Hlib, or Bory-shohlibska, built in 1839. The church is in poor repair and locked, except for religious services. A local said that very few people attended services regularly.
Across from the church stands a monument, in a field of tall grass and weeds, to the treaty between Ukraine's Cossacks and the Tsar of Moscow. On this spot on January 18, 1654 the Cossack elite gathered with their leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky and took an oath to the Tsar in return for military aid against Poland. That event began the intertwining of modern Ukraine and Russia that has lasted until this day.
Facing this famous historical monument stands a huge, unfinished and abandoned building. What it was meant to be is difficult to tell. If the building had been finished, it would be Pereyaslav's biggest. Maybe it could be completed into a hotel, which Pereyaslav desperately needs?
The next gem is near the town center: what is left of the Ascension (Voznesensky) Monastery and its cathedral, built in 1695-1700. One first sees the cathedral's bell tower, whose proportions are more pleasing to the eye than the recently built bell tower of St Michael's in Kyiv. The Ascension Cathedral is also well proportioned and maybe one of the best examples of church construction in 17th century Ukraine. It was built by Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who in 1709 rebelled against Moscow and united with King Charles of Sweden.
Attempting to enter the Ascension Cathedral was not a straightforward matter. There was no obvious sign that there was a museum inside it. Its external appearance suggested that it might be derelict and abandoned. There was a lock on one of the doors. But on the other side, there was an unlocked door. Upon entering, we were surprised to see that it was a war museum dedicated to the famous battle in 1943 when tens of thousands of Soviet troops stormed across the Dnieper River, not far from Pereyaslav.
The two staff members of this war museum were as bewildered to see tourists as we were to see the museum. For the three of us they charged a total Hr 1.50. As we were probably their only customers that day, this tiny sum of money would not go very far in paying their day's wage, let alone leave any spare change to make the museum more attractive, or to repair the cathedral.
The exposition at the military museum hardly did credit to such a famous battle. It was dominated by dozens of huge oil paintings of Soviet battle commanders. They hung like icons on the church walls. Perhaps the church should have been re-named St. Sovietica. One of the two museum employees proudly said that the oil portraits were painted by a famous school of military artists in Moscow. More interesting, in our opinion, were the personal war mementos donated by participants of the battle.
The war museum would be more attractive if it had photographs or documentary films of the battle itself. And it ought to be housed separately, so that the Ascension Cathedral could be a museum in its own right. It could be combined with Pereyaslav's outdoor military museum located some distance away. At the moment the outdoor museum is nothing more than a park of vandalized tanks,other assorted armored vehicles, and an airplane.
If even the Soviet government did not bother to create a separate war museum in Pereyaslav, it probably will be impossible to create one in the post Soviet period.
One of my two accomplices asked a museum employee, when will the cathedral be returned to and used for its original purpose? It brought forth an interesting reply. She said that the politicians who are now calling people to the churches only yesterday prosecuted people for doing just that. The person she had in mind was Leonid Kravchuk, the former communist ideological chief, then the first president of post-Soviet Ukraine, and now a member of Parliament.
The other museum on the grounds of the Ascension Monastery is the Hryhory Skovoroda Museum. It is located near the cathedral, in a building that used to house the Pereyaslav collegium. This college of higher learning was established in 1738 to serve the local elite.
Skovoroda was a unique personality in 18th-century Ukraine. He was a poet, philosopher, musician, teacher and a fervent religious believer, and was denounced as a heretic and rebel. He crossed swords with the local bishop over the methodology of teaching poetry, who reacted by excluding Skovoroda from the college and ordering the destruction of Skovoroda's manuscript on poetry.
The Skovoroda Museum is a gem not to be missed. Its library has a unique collection of 18th-19th century Latin, German, French and Russian books on all sorts of subjects. It shows the level of education that the college aspired to. Also interesting are the original desks used by the students as well as the type of garments they wore. What is amazing is that all this survived two world wars. The staff of the Skovoroda museum were welcoming and even had for sale a little pamphlet about the museum in Ukrainian and Russian.
The rest of what is left of the Ascen-sion Monastery is occupied by the army. One hates to think what the army has done to the monastery's buildings.
The nearby Kobza Museum of ancient Ukrainian musical instruments is also not to be missed. It holds a fine collection of banduras, including altos and bass, and many other unique folk instruments.
The biggest gem in Pereyaslav is its outdoor museum of architecture. In its quality and variety it far surpasses Kyiv's outdoor museum Pyrohiv. The collection at Pereya-slav's museum spans a much longer time period; it has fine examples of stone sarcophaguses dating from 2,000 BC, for example. There are many beautiful examples of stone works from other ancient and not so ancient societies in Ukraine. I saw my first 'steppe granny' (stepova baba). There is a very impressive 12th century stone carving of a Polovtsi warrior.
Much of the collection comes from the area flooded by Soviet-built hydroelectric dams along the Dnieper. Besides homes and churches, many old headstones were rescued, some dating back to the 15th century. There is one headstone from the 15th century with the name and date of the deceased Cossack. There is a re-built Cossack fort on the spot where it once stood, which is great for children. Also there is a house reconstructed from the remains of a 11th-century house found in Kyiv's Podil district.
Unique among the houses is that of the Yiddish writer Sholom-Aleichem. It comes complete with his books, furniture and family photographs.
The staff of Pereyaslav's open air museum find themselves in a perilous situation. They have not been paid for months. They do not have any money even to print a map of the site, let alone a detailed guide. (Hire a staff member to guide you around, as the site is huge. It will also be their only wage.) An even greater threat to the site, according to an employee, is that local mobsters are conspiring to sell the grounds, as it is owned by the local government.
The employees of Pereyaslav's open-air museum think they have a savior in sight. While preparing the civil defense camp, Pustovoitenko first popped in to the open-air museum. After seeing the grounds and hearing the staff's gripes, the prime minister promised to consider the possibility of central government taking the museum under its wings.
Will Pustovoitenko save the open-air museum from the local mafia? What will he do about the other five museums? What about the huge abandoned construction project near the monument to the treaty of 1654? And how many other historic sites in how many other towns are in the same situation. Is it not just a bit unrealistic for people to always look to central government for salvation?
The museums' staff in Pereyaslav should not wait for a savior. They should either solve their problems themselves or they should be replaced by those willing to do the job. Otherwise both the museums and staff will die of poverty and disappear like the sword once held by Hetman Khemelnytsky, which was recently stolen from one of Pereyaslav's museums.
