Ukrainians have a saying that "the land returns." One of the ways in which it is understood is that the land pushes old things it had swallowed before back to the surface. That is how many of the artifacts in the Mezhova History Museum came to its collection, explains Olha Kudryavtseva, who moved to the village after fleeing Myrnohrad in Donetsk Oblast.
Before the war, Mezhova, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, was nothing more to Olha than a place where a part of her family lived. But now, she knows every corner of the local museum, how pieces of its ancient pottery feel, how the bones of the village's ancestors look, and why there are only four vyshyvankas in the museum.
"I once came across a story told by an old woman from the region who said that during the Holodomor, they could trade their vyshyvankas for a piece of bread. Since these lands suffered terribly from hunger, this might be why there's not much left of this heritage," she explains.
Olha had never worked in the cultural field before she moved to her relatives in Mezhova for safety reasons. The museum, founded in the 1970s, was full of items yearning to be truly discovered, yet no one was there to make sense of them, as many locals were leaving for areas further west for safety, and the museum frequently lacked a manager.
Soon, Olha decided to take up that task.
"On my first day, I just came to the museum and simply looked over everything for a long time. We have an archive, so I also went there to look through things and sort them out. I would check out other places to find more information, going to the local library and our Palace of Culture, calling bigger Ukrainian museums, and subscribing to their pages to understand how they work."
While borrowing others' best practices was straightforward enough, collecting new information about Mezhova, where only about 8,000 people live, has been quite a challenge. Here, Olha relies heavily on locals.
Founded around a railway station in the 19th century, Mezhova remained a very important hub during both World Wars and even was commandeered by the Nazis during their occupation. It was during this time that the railway station, one of Mezhova's oldest buildings, lost its second floor forever.
Thanks to a local ethnographer and poet, Petro Babets, Olha's deepened her understanding of the region's past and now she confidently shares it with growing numbers of visitors.
"It is difficult to interest youth in a museum. Thanks to my work with Petro and the photographs that remain, we can find out really curious things. I also made a photo zone for them, a "Ukrainian khata" exposition, to immerse them in the early era. There are also things that I allow them to touch because it helps them to connect on a completely different level."
There are many photographs in the museum, but those of the previous century mainly belong to Oleksii Matiukhin. Luckily for the new generations, he is a fan of photography, and Olha regularly peruses his online collections to find out what else he has to show.
"Once, I had a photo exhibition for kids. It was not like a lecture, but rather a discussion of local life and the streets we all know. Suddenly, the children noticed that some photos were taken from really high above, and we could not figure out how, as there were no drones back then and there was no such high point in the village. We decided to call and ask Oleksii himself. It turned out that he was such a photography enthusiast, he rented a crane to take those photos! It was totally his initiative.
Thanks to Oleksii simply photographing the village, its streets and its buildings, we know precisely how Mezhova used to look. Now, the trees, which are small in his photographs, are giants in real life."
The museum has a remarkable ability to rekindle memories. When Olha saw the museum's old wooden nochvy and learned about the traditional dish cooked in them, it transported her back to her childhood, leaving her profoundly moved.
"Pshinka-zatirka is an ancient Ukrainian dish and a true hallmark of Mezhova. When I was a child, I spent my summers with my grandparents in a nearby village, and during one visit, their neighbors held a wedding. As per Ukrainian tradition, everyone was invited, and that's when I first tasted pshinka-zatirka.
The dish is a type of round pasta traditionally ground in nochvy by Ukrainian women. It was once very popular and even served at celebrations. Today, there are still women in Mezhova who maintain the original methods for making it. We organized a course on traditional pshinka-zatirka making internally displaced Ukrainians like me. Honestly, I'm not a professional, but now I can make some."
There was once life beating in each such relic in the museum. Although times have changed, Olha shows that it is possible to take these old items out of dusty shelves and embed them into modern reality. This is the only way museums can survive nowadays.
Luckily, Olha is carrying this out in the company of people with the same passion she has, and together they have turned the Mezhova museum into the center of the Ukrainian local intelligentsia. This includes local photographers like Oleksii Matiukhin, poets like Petro Babets and Liudmyla Yatsura, painters like Tetiana Velyka and Volodymyr Chornyi, and many more.
