Created between 16 by the Galician monk and painter Yov Kondzelevych and a team of at least 20 artisans, the iconostasis is a 42-foot-high, 36-foot-wide wall of gilded icons and other religious scenes set in exquisitely ornate wooden frames and crowned by a huge gold depiction of the Crucifixion. It had finally settled into a gallery of its own at the National Museum nine years earlier.Įven in a genre known for its dazzling opulence, the Bohorodchany Iconostasis stands by itself. Over the years the enormous, elaborate wooden altarpiece had been hastily disassembled and transported to safety, claimed as a spoil of war, tossed aside and left to rot. For more than two centuries it had been caught up in the region’s invasions, conflicts and shifting borders. Kozhan was particularly concerned about the pride of the collection, regarded by many scholars as the greatest example of Baroque-era religious art in Central Europe: the Bohorodchany Iconostasis. Instead, Kozhan and his employees met to formulate a strategy to protect the museum’s 1,800 objects on display-Ukrainian modern art, illuminated manuscripts and sacred icons spanning 800 years. Two years of the pandemic had been hard on the staff, and, with the situation inching back to normal, they had been busy planning an exhibition of the modernist Lviv painter Oleksa Novakovsky, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his birth. His first decision, a difficult one, was to immediately shut down the museum. The iconostasis was created at a monastery in Galicia, a region now crossing several nations. Ihor Kozhan, director of the Sheptytsky National Museum, with panels from the iconostasis before they were packed and moved out of the museum. So we had no plan.” Blindsided, Kozhan told his wife and daughter to stay safe, and then he steeled himself and went to work. “The Ministry of Culture gave no hints about what was going on. “All of the Western countries had been claiming that troops were massing, but our government insisted that nothing was going to happen,” he told me as we strolled through one empty gallery after another. On the morning of February 24, Kozhan awakened to the news of the Russian invasion. “This room was filled with religious icons,” he told me, pointing out rows of white climate-controlled display cabinets containing nothing but brass mounts. We walked through an arched doorway flanked by Corinthian columns and entered an exhibition hall that had been stripped bare. A short, burly man in his late 60s, with a kindly visage and tufts of brown hair sprouting from the sides of his pate, Kozhan led me up a flight of marble stairs in the museum’s deserted atrium. But by a side entrance of the opulent former villa, dating to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I met Ihor Kozhan, the museum director. The Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv had been closed since the first day of the war. To scholars, the early 18th-century religious artwork is a key to Ukrainian identity. The Bohorodchany Iconostasis before it was secreted away. The Bohorodchany Iconostasis hung on this wall. To safeguard cultural treasures, officials at the National Museum in Lviv removed 1,800 objects. Others gambled that the Russians wouldn’t target the city center and ignored the warning. It blasted from loudspeakers mounted on the building’s four-story clock tower, sending pedestrians scurrying into shelters. As I strolled beside City Hall, in medieval Rynok Square, the late afternoon hubbub of street musicians and cafégoers was shattered by an air raid siren.
In the nave of the Baroque Peter and Paul Garrison Church-now a frequent site of military funerals for soldiers killed in combat against Russia-three workmen, balancing themselves on scaffolding, wrapped a fireproof blanket around an 18th-century angel. Lviv, a jewel of cobblestone alleys, Hapsburg-era palaces and squares, and churches dating to the Middle Ages, possessed a veneer of calm. During the 70-minute drive into Lviv, western Ukraine’s largest city, we passed sandbagged checkpoints and posters proclaiming “Don’t Run Away, Protect Ukraine” and “Russians, Go F- Yourselves.” My Ukrainian interpreter was waiting for me.
The sufferer and the witness cover art driver#
A taxi whisked me 150 miles east from Krakow, Poland, toward the border town of Budomierz, past a convoy of trucks without license plates that, my driver told me, were almost certainly carrying weapons to the front. I set out for Ukraine on a cold, clear morning in March, four weeks after the Russian invasion.
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