A museum guide cannot conceal her surprise as two visitors are coming into the Taras Shevchenko Museum in a remote district in Kyiv.
“Who are you?” she asks, since few people from the street come knocking on the door.
The museum in Priorka, a historic area in northwestern Kyiv, is an old 18th-century wooden house. Ukrainian national bard Shevchenko stayed here for three weeks in 1859 while visiting Kyiv for the last time.
The house with three cold rooms has been receiving visitors since 1989 to tell the story of a man who was a great poet and artist, a civic activist and a very real, sensitive man, with a complex fate and plenty of bad luck in love.
Here Taras Shevchenko was known as Uncle Taras, and we tell a story of a simple human who lived his own difficult life.
– Yulia Ermolenko, a guide in the Priorka museum
The 198th anniversary of his March 9, 1814 birth will be celebrated, but the museum does not expect a crowd.
Olga Karpenko, the guide, says that the museum has lost visitors in recent years, but “gained in quality.”
“These days, students don’t necessarily come in a group.
Sometimes they just pop in while walking around. Same goes for foreigners,” she says.
There are three Shevchenko museums in Kyiv altogether, offering plenty of information about the bard in English, Polish and French in addition to Russian and Ukrainian Shevchenko himself used in his work.
But Yulia Ermolenko, a guide in the Priorka museum, says most of the information is badly presented. The tours are heavy on his great achievements in patriotic poetry, many examples of which are still compulsory for learning in schools and universities.
But “that’s not what people need now,” she says.
Ermolenko says dry biographical facts and his works are easily to Google in the modern information society. But his human side is not – and that’s where museums can shine.
When Shevchenko arrived incognito in Priorka, the local children fell in love with him. “Here Taras Shevchenko was known as Uncle Taras, and we tell a story of a simple human who lived his own difficult life,” she says.
Born to serfs in rural Ukraine, much of his productive adult life Shevchenko spent in Russia’s St. Petersburg. He visited Kyiv three times, but dreamed of living here, marrying a Ukrainian woman and building his own house.
He never had children of his own, but loved them very much and was generous, kind and charismatic. He knew many songs and sang them eagerly, and had a great sense of humor.
The great writer Taras Shevchenko has one of the nation’s leading universities bearing his name in Kyiv, while a statue of him lords over Shevchenko Park across from the university. (Ukrinform)
That’s what museum guides in Priorka tell their visitors, taking them around the rooms featuring dozens of pictures of Shevchenko’s friends on the walls, as well as a big portrait of the man himself, fully clad according to the 19th century fashion trends.
The house is full of little everyday objects like teacups and an old book press to show what the lifestyle was like back then.
If you want to get a glimpse of what Shevchenko was like as an artist, the best place for that is the central Shevchenko Museum located on the boulevard featuring his name. “There are about 700 Shevchenko-signed originals in the central museum.
There are some in Petersburg and Moscow, but the main collection is in Kyiv,” says Olga Shevchenko, who has spent 39 years working in a museum.
Anna Shevchuk, a guide from the Interesting Kyiv travel agency, says she did not like Shevchenko after studying his poems at school. She also says many guided tours in Shevchenko places are full of unnecessary pathos and overwhelm with facts and visuals.
She says if she was to design a tour, she would cut that out. “I think the Shevchenko cult has had enough of this, and I would just tell the story of a person,” she says.
There are many places to tell it around the city. There is the Shevchenko Park outside the red university building, also bearing his name. It’s a favorite spot for couples to meet for dates, older people to play chess and others to get drunk – an activity that Shevchenko himself often pursued.
There is a metro station named after him, as well as a square. There is a curious small monument to him on Andriyivskiy Uzviz.
Olga Shevchenko says people desperately lack knowledge about the nation’s hero. She says an average person abroad is more likely to know Andriy Shevchenko, a football star from Dynamo Kyiv, rather than Taras, who has been the symbol of Ukraine for centuries.
At home, people celebrate Women’s Day on March 8 more eagerly than Shevchenko’s day. “It clearly shows the level of our society. People just take what it is easier to understand,” she says. She is still hopeful that the hero, who died at age 47 in 1861, will be rediscovered.
Shevchenko Places
Central Taras Shevchenko Museum
12 Taras Shevchenko Blvd.
234-2556
Open 10 a.m. – 6p.m.
Hr 5-40
Hr 200 for guided tours in foreign languages
www.shevchenkomuseum.com.ua/
Memorial House-Museum of Taras Shevchenko
8-A Taras Shevchenko Lane
278-35-11
Open 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Hr 4-7
Hr 20 for guided tours
www.shevchenkomuseum.com.ua/
Priorka House
5 Vyshgorodska St.
432-76-27
Open 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Hr 5 – entrance
Hr 10 for guided tours
www.shevchenkomuseum.com.ua/
Guided tours to Shevchenko places
Prime Excursion Bureau
Kyiv In The Life And Works Of Taras Shevchenko
3 hours
Hr 1,100
http://primetour.ua/uk/excursions/kiev/Kiev-v-zhizni-i-tvorchestve-T–G–SHevchenko.html
Svyatoslav Travel Agency
Kyiv Through Shevchenko’s Eyes
3 hours
Hr 1,460 + museum tickets (for 30 people)
http://svjatoslav.kiev.ua/ek/140-kiyiv-ochima-t.shevchenka.html
Kyiv Post staff writer Daryna Shevchenko can be reached at [email protected]
