By Batkivshchyna [Homeland] Battalion
12.18.2014
Translated and edited by Voices of Ukraine
Somehow in Donbas: Culture, hate and the power of the Ukrainian spirit…
The Museum of Ukrainian Culture is in the village of Oleksandro-Kalynove in the Donetsk Region [north of Donetsk, inbetween Highway 20 and the Kalynivka River].
Local residents have equipped it themselves, bringing in pieces which would be the envy of pretentious metropolitan museums. What kind of Ukrainophobia and Russification may be involved when farmers, for lack of anything native or Ukrainian, begin to revive the culture of their own people here themselves?
Every item was brought here from families who, for years, kept it as a historic relic. Needless to say that a tiny piece of Ukrainian culture was like a splinter in the eye of local separs [slang word for the so-called “separatists”]?
People have been threatened, and told that both the Museum, and their farms, will be burnt. But they haven’t come to do it yet. Too quickly, they fled from the advancing Ukrainian army.
And the museum survived. And will continue to stand. Here, the soldiers of “Batkivshchyna” often come to visit – to spend a few minutes amongst Ukrainian antiquities and to be transported in their thoughts away from the war – to their native homes, where parents, children and grandchildren wait for them.
Voices of Ukraine 