Mariupol Museum Preserves Culture in Exile — A New Piece for the Cultural Freedom Project
Devastated and looted during Russia’s invasion, Mariupol’s Museum of Local Lore now operates in exile, its staff collaborating with international and local partners to digitally preserve the museum’s collection and protect Ukraine’s cultural heritage for future generations.
Raphael Lemkin Society Digital Communications Manager Viktoriia Savchuk Kennet recently wrote an article for the Cultural Freedom Project Substack, an initiative of the Penn Cultural Heritage Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The piece examines the profound impact of the war on the museum.
“Since the full-scale invasion, the Mariupol museum has become a powerful symbol of Russia’s destruction of Ukrainian cultural heritage,” writes Viktoriia Savchuk Kennet.
By early 2022, the Mariupol Museum of Local Lore held nearly 60,000 items, including art, archaeological, and ethnographic collections that reflected the culture and history of the Donetsk region. Russia’s full-scale invasion devastated this irreplaceable heritage. Bombings and subsequent fires ravaged the museum’s buildings, destroying a significant portion of its unique exhibits.
Meanwhile, surviving artifacts were illegally transported by Russian forces to the occupied city of Donetsk. Russia denies these claims, insisting that the entire museum was destroyed — an assertion widely viewed as an attempt to conceal the theft and further deprive Mariupol and Ukraine of their heritage.
Despite everything, the museum continues its work in exile. The team is currently developing an electronic catalog in cooperation with the Raphael Lemkin Society, HeMo: Ukrainian Heritage Monitoring Laboratory, and the Museum of Contemporary Art NGO. The project is supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Symbolically, the partnership was launched on February 6, 2025 — the museum’s 105th anniversary. In the coming months, the museum plans to present the electronic catalog to its partners.