You're reading: City Life: Calendar project promotes Ukrainian culture, to raise funds to repair Kyiv folk art museum

After being partially flooded in February 2018, Kyiv’s Ivan Honchar Museum could finally raise the money it needs for repairs.

The funds for museum’s restoration will be provided by the third Sincere charity project, which raises money by selling calendars with pictures of Ukrainian singers, TV hosts, ballet dancers and other celebrities, wearing authentic traditional Ukrainian clothes.

Ukrainian TV host Masha Efrosinina is one of the 15 celebrities who took part in creating the new calendar for 2019.

“I was immediately interested in the project, with its aesthetics and authentic Ukrainian outfits, restored or preserved, but connected to a time period I could only read about in books. These facts certainly fascinated and attracted me a lot,” Efrosinina said.

The third Sincere calendar is dedicated to traditional Ukrainian holidays and consists of 12 pages of sumptuous pictures of Ukrainian celebrities dressed up in national clothes from the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as texts in Ukrainian and English explaining the origins of the holidays.

All of the money from sales of the calendar will go to the restoration of the Kyiv’s Ivan Honchar Museum. The museum features the collection of 15,000 items of Ukrainian folk art that belonged to Honchar, a collector who died in 1993 and bequeathed his collection to the city.

A photo exhibition and a presentation of the calendar will be held at the Ivan Honchar Museum in Kyiv on Nov. 14, 2018.

The calendar will be released in a limited edition of 1,000 copies, and is now available for pre-order for Hr 500 for the big wall calendar, and Hr 250 for the small one.

Early steps

Sincere helps in preserving Ukrainian cultural heritage by using old authentic clothes and accessories to depict the lives and traditions of preceding generations in Ukraine.

Nataliia Kravets, 47, the founder of the project, said that Sincere was initially founded as a social initiative, with the aim of showing the beauty of traditional Ukrainian clothes and raising money for social issues.

“I think that this is our social mission — to draw attention to the problems of culture, our traditions, and to show how beautiful Ukrainian outfits are,” Kravets says.

According to Kravets, the idea for the project came from Yaroslava Gres, who is also the creative producer for Sincere, and the founder of Gres Todorchuk PR company. The whole project is implemented with funding from Kyiv’s Domosfera shopping center.

The first charity project was established in December 2014, after the EuroMaidan Revolution that ousted former President Viktor Yanukovych from power on Feb. 22, 2014. More than 100 people were killed as the Yanukovych regime attempted to put down the protests.

Efrosinina believes that it was the right time to start the project.

“In general, 2014 was a very crucial year for everyone, and while standing on the set before the first photo shoot, I could barely keep back the tears, because it all seemed so timely and relevant,” Efrosinina says.

With the first successful campaign in 2014, when all 1,000 copies of the calendar were sold in two weeks to customers from 12 countries around the world, raising more than Hr 200,000 for Kyiv’s Military Hospital, the project founders decided to launch the second Sincere campaign in 2016.

The second edition of the calendar, together with its photo exhibition, was dedicated to colors, and raised nearly Hr 150,000 or ($6,000) for the development of two museums: Novoaydar Regional Museum in Luhansk, a city some 820 kilometers east from Kyiv, and Kosiv Musieum of Folk Art in Ivano Frankivsk, a city some 620 kilometers west from Kyiv.

“In the western parts of Ukraine old traditions are maintained and followed, unlike in the eastern part, where practically nothing is preserved,” Kravets says.

Kravets said the name of the project reflects its spirit and the people who take part in the charity program.

“The people participating in our project are ones who participate actively in the development of Ukraine, and I believe that each of them is sincere in their actions and attitude towards the people in our country,” Kravets said.

More than 50 Ukrainian TV hosts, singers, dancers, movie and theater actors and other celebrities have taken part at the project since its beginning in 2014.

Holidays

Kravets says the aim of the current project is to collect money for Kyiv’s Ivan Honchar Museum, which was seriously damaged after a heating water main burst on Feb. 13, 2018.

“When we heard about the bursting of the heating main in the Ivan Honchar Museum and found out that the museum hall had been flooded, we decided to attract public attention to the problem,” says Kravets.

This year, the photo exhibition will be held at the Ivan Honchar Museum for the first time, which the organizers hope will attract a new audience to the museum.

In order to create this year’s Sincere calendar, the museum loaned out more than 16 costumes for the photo shoots — all of the clothes are authentic and restored, and were made between the 19th and 20th centuries in various parts of Ukraine.

Some of the clothing items weigh up to two kilograms and contain hundreds of small beads, as well as featuring traditional embroidery patterns.

Such celebrities as Jamala, the Ukrainian singer who won the Eurovision international song contest in 2016, electronic folk band Onuka, singers Nina Matviyenko, Tina Karol, and Kazka, TV host Lesia Nikitiuk and many others dressed up in authentic Ukrainian clothes from various regions of the country during the photo shoots.

Some images, in particular the one by Nata Zhyzhchenko, the leader of Ukrainian band Onuka, depict traditional Ukrainian bridal clothes.

“It was really fun to try on such old bridal clothes and to see how I could look centuries ago,” Zhyzhchenko said.

Zhyzhchenko, who together with Efrosinina has taken part in the project for a third time, said Sincere is a great opportunity to see the cultural heritage of Ukraine from another perspective, as well as a way to feel proud of Ukraine’s traditions.

“It’s rare to get a chance to reflect a completely different era through photography,” Zhyzhchenko said. “I admire the fact that all the clothes were authentic and vintage, as people usually have very few chances to touch or even to see such old-fashioned clothes in their everyday lives,” Zhyzhchenko said.

Efrosinina said that the project shows off Ukrainian culture in its real, extraordinary beauty and aesthetics, in a form that is rarely seen by anybody.

“The famous people occupy a secondary role here, as we only help to display this beauty,” she said.