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Chapter 1: What cultural heritage is being threatened in Ukraine?
This is The Guardian.
Today the art and the artists under attack in Ukraine.
Here's what's happening tonight. The Soviets are saying little, but what is known is cause for concern. A nuclear accident has occurred at a Soviet atomic plant in the Ukraine.
In 1986, reactor four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. It triggered the worst nuclear accident in history.
It's really, really hard to overstate what a huge effect that catastrophe had on Ukraine.
We were recently stricken by a disaster. the Chernobyl nuclear power accident.
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Chapter 2: How did the Chernobyl disaster shape Ukraine's identity?
It deeply affected the Soviet people and disturbed world opinion.
It was one of those events that absolutely contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's a sort of foundational event in the future independent Ukraine's sense of itself.
Exactly 40 years later, on the 26th of April this year, the Chornobyl Museum reopened in Kiev after going through a huge renovation to make sure it truly commemorated the impact of the disaster.
It had transformed itself, thinking about all the people who were affected by the disaster, and that was a lot of people, because thousands of people were displaced, for example.
This is Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian's chief culture writer. She was in Ukraine on a reporting trip in the south at the time of the reopening, and she was planning on visiting the museum as soon as she returned to Kyiv. And the thing is, I never saw it.
Just three weeks after the reopening, on the night of the 23rd of May, the museum was bombed, part of a huge combined missile strike by the Russians, one of the biggest attacks on the capital so far.
We've already seen missiles going into the city.
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Chapter 3: What happened to the Chornobyl Museum shortly after its reopening?
There's also the sound of anti-aircraft fire in the background there and the buzz of drones above us.
Charlotte visited what was left of the building a few days later.
I had not expected being in that destroyed museum to be quite so upsetting.
And considering the fact that I've been working on the restoration project and the recent collection for the last three years, you can imagine what a powerful impact it made on me.
The museum director was standing in the middle of this collapsing, burnt out building, kind of clutching a brown painted earthenware jug with some patterning on it. A traditional piece of ceramic from the region where Chernobyl is.
Okay, so while the rescuers were kind of digging up the ceiling between the first and second floor, they found this jar from Polisa, which is, as you can see, it's like a small miracle.
She was actually deeply in shock. They reckon that they were able to save 40% of the artefacts on display. Every time a museum artefact is destroyed, it means the loss of a singular object that holds memory and knowledge.
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Chapter 4: How has the war impacted Ukrainian artists and cultural sites?
And once it's gone, it's gone.
Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion, tens of thousands of Ukrainians have lost their lives. Homes flattened. Cities turned to rubble. But there's been another cost. Ukrainian culture is also under attack. Thousands of museums, galleries, historic landmarks across the country have been destroyed or damaged. Artists, filmmakers, writers and poets have been killed.
Countless works of art have been lost. And the attacks appear to be increasing.
Chapter 5: What efforts are being made to save Ukraine's cultural heritage?
Just this week, Russia bombed one of the oldest and most precious religious sites in the centre of Ukraine in what the government said was a targeted attack. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus, the race to save Ukraine's cultural heritage. Charlotte Higgins, you're The Guardian's chief culture writer and your book, Ukrainian Lessons Art in a Time of War, is out in August.
Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, you have visited the country many times. And you know, you're not a war correspondent, you're a culture writer and a critic. So what keeps drawing you back to Ukraine, despite the obvious danger?
I went for the first time in October 2022 in order to write what I imagined would be one article about the way artists were reflecting and documenting the war in their work. Because I had a conviction that artists would be responding to the war in a way that would likely be...
more interesting and more revealing than the work of even our dear colleagues, journalists and government reports, surely not, and politicians.
Chapter 6: How are citizens responding to the destruction of cultural artefacts?
And this was going to be a super interesting aspect of the war to try to cover. People are writing extraordinary poetry. There are amazing plays being written. People are making tremendous art. all of which I'm sure is going to shape the way this war is remembered. And the stakes are extraordinarily high. I mean, this is literally life or death.
And the other reason that I wanted to go originally was that it was just extremely clear that culture was implicated in the war in an incredibly clear way. That is to say that Putin has repeatedly talked about The idea that Ukraine doesn't really have a separate culture, that Ukrainians and Russians are, quote, sort of brothers, that they belong together.
Chapter 7: What role does language play in the cultural identity of Ukraine?
And he even wrote an essay about this at the summer before the full-scale invasion. And it's a really a kind of, it's a denial of Ukraine as a separate identity. And you look at it through my eyes, through the doubtless prejudiced eyes of a culture writer, it just feels like a war about culture because history, language, identity are so implicated in it.
And you're actually learning Ukrainian, aren't you?
I am learning Ukrainian because I started learning Ukrainian almost as soon as I got back from my first trip. Because language is a part of culture, so it felt really churlish not to know any of the language.
I will tell you that it's a massive struggle learning this language, but I am currently on an intensive Ukrainian course because I intend to conquer this language, even if it takes me until the next life to do so.
It's very hard. So you were recently in the ruins of the Chernobyl Museum, obviously a really traumatic experience for those who work there. And I think I was reading in your reporting just before the interview that you had some kind of quite startling stats that something like the Russian army had destroyed or damaged 1723 cultural heritage sites.
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Chapter 8: How is the decolonization of Ukraine influencing cultural narratives?
2,524 cultural infrastructure sites since 2022. So, I mean, it's huge, isn't it, the scale of that destruction?
Yeah, it's huge. And it's very hard if you look at either government or, as it were, UNESCO statistics, it's kind of an ungraspable picture. But there are kind of several categories. One is those places that have come under occupation, right? So,
In Mariupol, for instance, at the beginning of the war, at least one museum was completely destroyed and burnt in aerial bombing as a result of fires from bombs. In Kherson, for example, the museum there was destroyed. emptied out as far as the Russians could manage at the end of their occupation.
So truckloads of artefacts were taken into Russia and some experts have tracked some of these artefacts from the Museum in Kherson onto the Russian art market. And being in Kiev the last...
couple of weeks these bombing campaigns are just relentless it's been going on for so long and no sooner have you recovered from one than you're waiting for the next and you know you visit some of these sites afterwards you've told us about the impact of going into the the kind of smoking ruins of the chernobyl museum when you've been to other sites what what were people's kind of spirits like that the people that work there that love those places
So on the same day as I went to the Chernobyl Museum, I also went to the National Museum of Fine Art, basically the National Gallery of Ukraine. It's a classic museum in that it looks like a Greek temple. It's really, really beautiful. They evacuated their collection several years ago. But inside that building, the building was just full of broken glass and rubble.
And one of the chief conservators, the head of the curatorial team and two interns who were there to do their practical art history experience, they were there with shovels in clouds of dust, shoveling rubble into carts. And the director said to me, you know, you can be sort of mentally prepared for it, and yet you're just not really prepared for it when it happens.
Charlotte, this week we saw the bombing of one of Ukraine's oldest monasteries. Can you just tell us about this monastery and why this attack is so important to people in Ukraine?
Well, actually, Annie, I honestly thought they would never hit this site. particular monastery, because this monastery was founded in the 11th century by monks who came from Mount Athos and founded this, what became eventually a complex, a whole complex of churches, monastery, now it's museums, kind of cultural and religious territory.
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