If you want to immerse yourself in the atmosphere of the ancient everyday life of free Cossacks and their descendants, dive into the history of a village spread out in a picturesque corner of the Kyiv Polissia and trace its path from its very founding in 1648 up to the events of today’s Russian-Ukrainian war – visit the Bobrytsia Museum of Local Lore!
The museum is located in the centre of the village of Bobrytsia in the Bucha district, next to the avant-garde art sculpture park. The museum’s doors opened in 2010 on the initiative of a Bobrytsia resident in love with his land, a local historian and collector of antiquities, Mykola Andriiovych Kovalchuk. The story of the museum’s creation is interesting: Mykola Andriiovych was working on a research book about the history of his native village and, to illustrate the book, began collecting photographs of residents and landscapes of Bobrytsia. But fellow villagers, besides photographs, began bringing items of ancient everyday life preserved in families from their forebears: dishes, spinning wheels, a cradle, as well as embroidered shirts and items of clothing. In time, so many things that recreated the living history of the descendants of the Cossack settlement had accumulated that the only way to preserve this treasure was to create a local museum. Today the museum’s exhibition includes more than 5000 photographs and documents together with household items, national costumes, embroidered shirts, towels and more.
The Bobrytsia museum is not just a repository of historically valuable things; it is constantly developing and filling up, covering a huge span of time from the past to the present: here you will see both a jug from the Chernyakhiv culture, accidentally found in Zhornivka while digging a well, and the shield of a fighter of the “Heavenly Hundred” who died on the Maidan for the honour and independence of Ukraine, and a helmet with yellow-and-blue ribbons of Bobrytsia residents who took part in the Maidan.
Every item in the museum has its own unique story, such as, for example, a wedding wax wreath from the 1950s. Such unique creations were made by a local woman from scraps of paper, foil sweet wrappers – from everything she managed to find in those hard, hungry times. Her skilled hands kept alive the rare craft of weaving magical wedding wreaths, and not a single wedding in Bobrytsia and the surrounding villages went without her multi-tiered crowns.
The pearl of the museum and its foundation is the complete genealogical tree of all families of Bobrytsia, starting from 1750. The memory of the lineage of the first founders of Bobrytsia – the opryshoks and Cossacks of Bohdan’s time, the Potapenkos, Yaroshenkos, Danchenkos and Ihnatenkos – is kept here. Along the museum walls hang photographs in the frames in which they lived before the museum. These photographs can tell a lot: about the personal guard of Emperor Nicholas II made up of Bobrytsia men, about the creation of the first collective farm and school in the village, and about the village elder to whom the people of Bobrytsia owe their lives during the Nazi occupation.
The museum has 5 rooms, one of which is a svitlytsia (parlour) recreating the layout and way of life of Bobrytsia residents a hundred years ago.
After reconstruction, the museum building was painted by Bohdan Hdal, a well-known graphic designer, artist, author of murals and public activist.
Opening hours of the Bobrytsia Museum of Local Lore: every Saturday and Sunday from 9 to 14. You can arrange a tour on another day by phone 0965374353.
