By Kostas Onisenko
Dozens of ecclesiastical objects of great religious value, which were considered lost from the late 1930s, were found in a list of the Moscow Museum. These are ecclesiastical objects that the Bolsheviks had seized from the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, also known as Kyiv Monastery of the Caves. In particular, in the 1920s, when the Bolsheviks took power, dozens of ecclesiastical objects were removed from the Sofievsky and Uspensky cathedrals in Kyiv, which had then been converted into a museum, to ensure “their safekeeping,” but in the following years, they were completely lost. The objects that were removed and essentially stolen were of great ecclesiastical and historical value.
In 2001, Grygory Poliyushko, the curator of the Lavra Museum, published a monograph, “The Lost Treasures of Lavra Museum,” which listed the valuable objects that the Soviet authorities had removed from the Lavra Museum and handed over to the State Treasury of USSR.
A few days ago, the archaeologist Tymur Bobrovskyy decided to compare the digital catalog of the Moscow State Historical Museum with the monograph published by Poliyushko, and found that 57 of the 119 objects listed in the monograph are now in the museum. In fact, 40 of the 57 were considered by Ukrainian archaeologists to be lost forever. And this given that these are only objects that have been digitized and for all the objects in the possession of the Moscow Museum.
