Mariupol Museum of Local Lore: Digital Catalog of the Lost Collections
The Mariupol Museum of Local Lore, in partnership with the Raphael Lemkin Society, has been developing a digital catalog of the museum’s collections.
Project partners also include the HeMo: Ukrainian Heritage Monitoring Laboratory and the Museum of Contemporary Art NGO. The initiative is supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Penn Cultural Heritage Center.
As of early 2022, the museum’s collections comprised approximately 60,000 objects, including fine art, archaeological, and ethnographic materials that collectively documented the history and culture of the Donetsk region. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine disrupted decades of curatorial work and placed the very existence of the collections at risk.
During the war, the museum—like the city of Mariupol—sustained extensive destruction. Occupying forces looted portions of the collections, destroyed other materials, and the fate of numerous objects remains unknown. Among the losses are works by Ivan Aivazovsky and Arkhyp Kuindzhi, as well as archaeological artifacts and unique archival documents that recorded the historical development of the region.
At present, the Mariupol Museum of Local Lore continues to operate in exile, seeking to reconstruct its collections at least in digital form. The creation of a digital catalog constitutes a critical step in this effort.
The digital catalog is intended not only to preserve cultural memory but also to serve as an essential resource for documenting and investigating crimes committed by the Russian Federation against Ukraine’s cultural heritage.
Currently, the catalog includes the museum’s painting and graphic arts collections, encompassing approximately 1,700 objects by 532 artists. In the future, the platform will expand to provide preservation and access to the museum’s art, ethnographic, archaeological, and historical collections held prior to 2022.
Notably, work on the project commenced on the eve of the museum’s 105th anniversary, on February 6, 2025.
On December 18, 2025, the museum team and its partners presented the Ukrainian-language version of the digital catalog of the museum’s collections at an online event.
On March 30, 2026, the museum launched an English-language version of the catalog, making the digitally preserved collection accessible to an international audience.