STAMFORD, Connecticut — A certainly priceless, often breathtaking, collection of Ukrainian cultural and historic artifacts – probably the largest outside Ukraine – is housed in an imposing 19th-century mansion in a city of just 130,000 people in the U.S. state of Connecticut.
Recently the Kyiv Post visited the Ukrainian Museum and Library of Stamford, about a 90-minute drive north of New York City – a trip well worth making for anyone interested in Ukrainian history or culture or that of the Ukrainian diaspora in North America.
The sheer number of items is staggering. The museum boasts some 7,000 folk artifacts including wood carvings, ceramics, kylym handwoven carpets, embroidery, traditional costumes from different areas of Ukraine, musical instruments, and rich host of other eclectic and more commonplace items.
It has more than 3,000 paintings, prints, woodcuts, sculptures, many by Ukrainian artists who have achieved world-renown such as Yakiv Hnizdovsky, Ivan Marchuk, Oleksandr Archipenko, Serhiy Lytvynenko, Oleksa Hryshchenko (known as Alexis Gritchenko in France where he lived and achieved world fame).
Ukraine’s history is tightly connected to its Christian faith and Orthodox and Catholic churches, and that is something reflected in the museum’s collection of 1000 crosses, icons, church vestments, jewelry, and other religious items.
That intertwining of Ukraine’s history and Churches also led directly to the museum’s creation by a remarkable figure in shaping the story of the Ukrainian diaspora in America, Bishop Constantine Bohachevsky.
Bohachevsky (whose name is also spelled Konstantyn) was born in 1884 near the town of Zolochiv in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and after World War I was incorporated into eastern Poland and is now part of western Ukraine.
He studied at universities in Lviv, Innsbruck, and Munich before being ordained in 1909. He rose steadily in the church hierarchy before World War I started in 1914, part of which he served as a military chaplain for Ukrainian soldiers in the Austrian army.
In 1923, after being ordained a bishop by the Pope in Rome, he was sent to minister to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church faithful in America. The previous head of the UGCC in the U.S. had died in 1916 and the church had slipped into disarray and was riven by internal disputes and competition for its parishioners’ loyalty, particularly by Hungarian Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox influence’s.
Creating the first Ukrainian cultural institute in America
Bohachevsky applied his considerable organizational talents, intellect, and an ability to project spirituality to placate and unite the disparate members of his flock.
By the time of his death in 1961, the inspirational Bohacehevsky had forged the UGCC in America into a prestigious, vigorous organization with moral and political clout that was pivotal in keeping the Church alive when it was banned and persecuted in Ukraine during communist rule.
In the run-up to and after Ukraine’s 1991 independence, the UGCC in America channeled considerable resources to rebuild the church in Ukraine.
Bohachevksy’s seat of office was in Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, the state that had attracted tens of thousands of the earliest Ukrainian immigrants to America.
They started arriving in Pennsylvania in the late 19th century, mostly Ukrainian Catholics from areas now in western Ukraine, because it offered plentiful work in the coal mines and steel mills that turned the state into an industrial powerhouse.
Connecticut and the area around Stamford drew immigrants because of industries like engineering, textile mills, stone-quarrying, and tobacco plantations.
Lubow Wolynetz is the curator at the museum where she started working part-time in 1982 and became so enthralled that she has been a driving force there ever since.
She said Bohachevsky bought the mansion, called The Chateau for the UGCC in 1933 from a wealthy businessman much reduced by the 1929 world financial crisis.
The stone building, with its turrets, gables and steeply pointed roofs, is described in Stamford’s guidebooks as a “Second Empire style Villa.” Its high, wood-paneled rooms with timbered ceilings and large windows, contain fireplaces big enough to park a horse and carriage in. It seems a perfect setting for a movie with a darkly gothic theme.
Furniture, chandeliers, clocks and other articles dating from the 18th and 19th centuries came with the property when Bohachevsky purchased it and remain there today. The Chateau thus not only functions as a space to display Ukrainian culture but is itself an enchanting example of a bygone American age.
Wolynetz said: “When Bishop Bohachevsky bought the estate he wanted a place for a seminary as well as a cultural center. What became the Saint Basil College Seminary, which still carries on its work, naturally, was the first priority because he needed priests educated here to serve the parishioners in America.”
He also started the St. Basil Preparatory School which operated between 1933-90.
She said the bishop realized that the first and second generations of children born to Ukrainian immigrants were being Americanized and assimilated and they had “no base where they could draw something of their heritage and he believed a museum and cultural center would help the community preserve that Ukrainian language, heritage and culture and develop intellectually.”
Wolynetz said Bohachevsky also wanted to create somewhere Americans could come to learn about Ukraine. The result was the first Ukrainian cultural institute in America.
Wolynetz said Bohachevsky, in his days as a theological student, had taken an interest in the UGCC’s work to create a museum in Lviv.
“Bohachevsky had taken courses about organizing and running museums. So he had some background and knowledge and basic information about museology which he transferred to here,” she said. “He threw himself into the project and involved talented clerics and lay people to advance it.”
One of the UGCC’s most venerated leaders, Metropolitan Archbishop Andrei Sheptytsky of Lviv, also enthusiastically supported the project. He donated a painting called “The Madonna of Saint George Cathedral” as an expression of unity between the church in Ukraine and America for the official opening ceremony in September 1937.
Bohachevsky commissioned and purchased some items but many were donated by individuals or groups from the burgeoning diaspora community. That process has continued throughout the years.
A collection that keeps growing
The museum has acquired such a huge inventory that it can only exhibit some 10 percent of it at a time on the first two floors of the building. The vast majority of the collection is stored elsewhere and exhibitions are rotated every year or so.
Many documents and books are exhibited or stored on hundreds of meters of shelving in a separate building, known as the Cultural Research Center, which formerly housed the preparatory school.
The museum itself displays many magnificent and rare publications including centuries-old bibles and religious texts from among the first printed on the territory that is Ukraine.
One book of theological instruction, on show in a glass cabinet, was printed in 1491 – one year before explorer Christopher Columbus reached America’s shores.
Other documents include old banknotes, postage stamps, some of the oldest maps showing Ukraine, and historic official documents pertaining to the short-lived independent Ukraine in the years following World War One while it fought, as today, against Moscow’s attempts to destroy it.
Many invaluable documents that testified to Ukraine’s independence aspirations were destroyed after the nascent republic was defeated and torn apart in the interwar years. The victors wanted to eradicate evidence of Ukraine’s separate history and nationhood. The Soviets continued those efforts during communist rule.
So the various works of art, artifacts, books, and documents brought to the West by politicians, military veterans, artists, writers, activists, academics and ordinary people who fled Ukraine after the embattled republic was crushed and swallowed up, gained immense importance in the struggle to keep alive the very notion of Ukraine and make it known to the world.
One of its most prized possessions is an 1840 first edition of Ukrainian national poet Taras Schevchenko’s collection of works entitled “Kobzar,” which gave tremendous impetus to the19th century efforts to awaken Ukrainian national identity.
The museum possesses many items that reflect various facets of Ukraine’s, ultimately unsuccessful, 1917-21 fight for independence.
Their country’s arguments for nationhood are contained in documents brought by diplomats of the Ukrainian National Republic, or UNR, to the Versailles Peace Conference, where the victorious powers redrew the world’s political map.
There are petitions and pamphlets from diaspora organizations calling for Ukrainian independence addressed to American and world leaders, official papers, personal diaries, posters, chronicling the life and activities of Ukrainians in the “old country” and in the North American diaspora.
The museum has a fine display of uniforms, weapons, and military headgear used by Ukraine’s fighters from that period.
A collection of nearly 200 colorful water paintings, by Mykola Bytynsky, himself a colonel in the army of the UNR, is likely the most complete record of the various types of military uniform worn by those who fought in Ukraine’s first bid for independence in the 20th century.
His painstakingly-executed works show the warriors in the splendid uniforms of different services – infantry, cavalry, airmen, sailors – and variations depending on units and the fighter’s rank.
After the fighting was over, Bytynsky was interned in Poland and later lived in Czechoslovakia until the upheavals of World war Two made him a refugee once more. He finally settled in Canada.
Another fascinating trove of images is 3,000 old-fashioned glass negatives of the type used during photography’s early years that depict the life of a legendary Ukrainian military formation of those times, the Sichovi Striltsi.
Originally a rifle brigade composed of west Ukrainians in the Austrian Army during World War I, their training and battle-experience made them an invaluable, elite fighting unit for the UNR.
The prestigious Taras Schevchenko Scientific Society in New York City is cleaning, restoring and digitizing the unique photographs.
The museum’s photographs from those turbulent times reveal surprises such as that many of the UNR’s military, not only medical personnel but fighters including officers, were women, like infantry officer Handzia Dmytryk, who, after years of adventure, fraught with danger, moved to New Jersey in the U.S.
The museum in the future
The UGCC has always played the leading role in the development and finance of the museum and does so today. Wolynetz is in charge of the museum, a senior cleric, Monsignor John Terlecky, is director of the Cultural Research Center.
While the museum is opened most weeks from Wednesday to Friday afternoons and groups can also visit by special appointment, the biggest event is the annual Ukrainian Day Festival.
Wolynetz said that several thousand people – with or without Ukrainian backgrounds – attend the festival, always held on a Sunday in September, to watch concerts of traditional Ukrainian dancers and choirs, sample Ukrainian cuisine and visit the museum and cultural center.
She said that such events and sometimes others generate funds to help in the upkeep of the museum and cultural center. But Wolynetz said the biggest share of costs is covered by the UGCC’s Stamford Eparchy.
Wolynetz was born in the western Ukrainian town of Delyatin in the Carpathian Mountains and her father, who worked for the railroad, organized a dramatic escape for his family and others in a train that sped westwards ahead of the advancing Soviet forces, responsible for terror and mass murder when they had occupied the area between 1939-41.
After a period in postwar refugee camps in Germany, the family arrived and settled in New York.
Her interest in museums began at the Ukrainian museum in New York City. She is an expert at traditional Ukrainian embroidery and her classes at that museum, which continue today, have taught hundreds over the years the skills to create their own intricate and beautiful embroidery.
She maintains her links with the New York museum which is often loaned items for its exhibitions by the Stamford Museum.
Wolynetz said that researchers, from Ukraine and elsewhere, frequently delve into the treasure house of Ukrainian history and culture that is the museum at Stamford and she is eager to extend collaboration with other institutions or individuals working to learn or spread knowledge about Ukraine.
She works with Ukraine’s Churches, to transfer books, especially doubles, from the collection in Stamford to Ukraine where museums, schools, and other institutions can put them to good use.
She is also searching for more persons to work at the museum part or full-time.
Currently, two people from Ukraine assist Wolynetz – Anna Perekhodko, a professional, who has worked at museums in Kyiv, and Natalia Kyrych, who conducts tours and is learning about the myriad skills needed to keep a museum functioning.
“The collection is always growing,” she Wolynetz, “especially books but also other archival material like sheet music. And we get wood carvings, embroidery, kylyms, icons.”
Much material is being donated as some of the older emigres, who came to the U.S. as children or young people pass away.
Wolynetz’ devotion to the museum is obvious and her enthusiasm is infectious. She laughs as she says: “It is a work of joy. I enjoy doing this.” But, at 81 years of age, she is conscious that she cannot go on forever.
One of her biggest concerns is the backlog in cataloging the ever-increasing number of items at the museum. “It is only partially properly cataloged. But a lot of it is only cataloged in here,” she said, tapping her head.
