It was late in the evening of May 7, 2022, when a Russian missile hit a museum that was once home to the 18th-century Ukrainian poet and philosopher Hryhory Skovoroda.
“The roof was completely blown off, the walls were burned, and only the statue of Skovoroda survived. It’s a miracle that it happened,” said Nastya Ishchenko, deputy director of the museum in the Kharkiv region of northeastern Ukraine.
According to the UN cultural organization, UNESCO, it is one of 432 cultural sites damaged in Ukraine since the start of the large-scale invasion on February 24, 2022.
The destruction of much of their culture has not only further distanced Ukrainians from the Russian-dominated cultural space they shared for decades under Soviet rule.
It has also fueled a hunger for their own culture, described by one daily as a “Ukrainian cultural flowering”.
A total of 139 religious sites, 214 buildings of historical or artistic importance, 31 museums, 32 monuments, 15 libraries and one archive were affected.
The management of the Hryhoriy Skovoroda Museum knew that the museum could be attacked and therefore most of the valuable objects had been moved to a safer location.
There was no other potential target near the museum, so the Ukrainians believe the museum was bombed purely for its cultural importance.
Ukraine’s museums in Russian-occupied territories have faced a very different problem. The full extent of the plundering by Russian troops came to light in the final days of the occupation of the southern city of Kherson.
Entire truckloads of artwork and historical artifacts were taken by the Russians, ostensibly for “safe keeping.”
The Kherson Art Museum says it has identified 120 works of art taken to Crimea, another occupied territory in Ukraine. But the total number of artifacts lost by the museum is more than 10,000.
In some museums in occupied parts of Ukraine, the Russians have removed exhibits for propaganda purposes. For example, an exhibit on the modern history of Ukraine in Berdyansk has been replaced with one glorifying the “special military operation” – the Kremlin’s official name for the war against Ukraine.
Last May, another aspect of modern Ukrainian culture came under fire when the Faktor Druk printing house in Kharkiv, used by virtually all Ukrainian book publishers, was destroyed.
Not every cultural building was hit deliberately, although the attack on Faktor Druk, which killed seven people and destroyed 50,000 books, was widely seen as a targeted attack.
Other buildings were hit because they were too close to other buildings or because they were unusable for Ukrainian officials or troops.
One publisher described the destruction of books at Faktor Druk as leading to a decline in morale in society. And the disappearance of numerous cultural sites in Ukraine has put pressure on its social fabric.
They are crucial for the cohesion and resilience of communities in times of war, says Chiara Dezzi Bardeschi, head of UNESCO’s department in Ukraine.
“What I’ve seen is that communities are really asking for culture and their cultural centres. They recognise the importance of it to the community and they need it for their resilience. Culture is really important for healing trauma,” she told the BBC.
Ukraine’s acting Minister of Culture, Rostyslav Karandeyev, believes that Russia is deliberately attacking the country’s spiritual and historical symbols: “Not only military targets and critical infrastructure, but also everything that allows Ukrainians to speak about their own identity and statehood.”
As part of this policy, Russian forces have removed and destroyed Ukrainian books from schools and libraries in occupied territories, he told the BBC.
But despite all the gloom, Nastya Ishchenko of the Skovoroda Museum believes that Ukrainians have also come to value more what is threatened by the Russian invasion.
“It’s like a relationship: to understand what you’ve lost, you have to take it away,” she says. “We’re not uniting around aggression or anger, but around cultural values that we’re all going to pass on to future generations. It gives us a ray of light.”
The newspaper describes how bands, artists and writers perform, how new plays premiere and how the theaters are full.
The many volunteers from Ukraine have not only provided essential food, clothing and medicine, but also musical instruments.
“Children said music helped them emotionally, it took them to a place where they don’t hear bombs or sirens. It helps them a lot,” UK-based musician Irina Gould told the BBC podcast Ukrainecast.
“For them it is the best medicine: getting away from reality for a while and living in a world full of beauty and happiness.”
