I knew Vasyl Stus as a child: an interview with the director of the Stus Museum has been published

A documentary interview with memories of the Ukrainian dissident poet Vasyl Stus has been published online. 93-year-old Dmytro Omelyanchuk, who heads the Stus Museum in his native village of Rakhnivka in Vinnytsia region, spoke about the uniqueness of the museum, valuable exhibits, and shared his memories of Vasyl Stus, UNN reports .

Dmytro Omelyanchuk personally knew the poet as a child: they lived in the neighborhood. And already in his adult years, he set out to glorify his gifted and indomitable countryman. 

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Over the years, the museum has become not just a duty for me, but a vocation. And Vasyl Stus has become a symbol of steadfastness and indestructibility. Most of all, I remember the moment when Vasyl was harvesting ears of grain in 1947, a difficult, hungry year. He came here on vacation, there was nothing to eat, and we went to pick ears of grain. But the village guard caught up with him, whipped him on the back, scattered the ears, and Vasyl went home. The next day, the field was plowed. This was the situation, this was the attitude to people and to life

In 1990, Dmytro Omelyanchuk started creating the Stus Museum with the intention of making it a center for the education and development of young people from all over Ukraine. Over the years, he managed to collect more than 600 unique exhibits: a Stus cradle, an embroidered shirt, a guitar, a gramophone, and other household items and clothing. 

"After Ukraine's independence, Vasyl Stus was spoken of aloud as a brilliant poet and dissident, and a fighter against the totalitarian regime.  Before that, they used to say that he was a repeat offender who had betrayed the Ukrainian people, the Soviet government, and was serving his sentence. And in 1990, the head of the regional police department, Lieutenant General Viktor Semenovych Tyazhlov, visited us in Rakhnivka and said: "The police imprisoned Stus, and we want to rehabilitate him. Do you mind if we open a museum room in your school?" And I was in favor. So we opened the museum and started collecting exhibits," says Dmytro Omelyanchuk.

The interviews were filmed with the support of the MHP-Hromada Charitable Foundation as part of the project Preserving the Cultural Heritage of Ukrainians. Thanks to the Foundation's financial support of UAH 100,000, the Stus Museum was modernized and updated with showcases, shelving, and technical equipment. 

In addition to the Stus Museum in Rakhnivka, the MHP-Hromada Charitable Foundation has supported five other museums: the Vyacheslav Chornovil Museum-Estate in Cherkasy region, the Mykola Leontovych Museum in Vinnytsia region, the Vasyl Symonenko Museum in Cherkasy, the Trypillia Culture Museum in Cherkasy region, and the National Museum of Folk Architecture and Life of Ukraine in Kyiv. It will continue to restore and support Ukrainian museums to preserve unique artifacts and develop museum tourism among Ukrainians. 

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We live in a time when Ukrainians are rediscovering their own history, looking for answers to important questions in traditions and rituals, and trying to understand themselves through the knowledge of their own roots. Museums play an extremely important role in this process. Museums collect unique information, record important dates, and look for root causes. And this contribution is made not only by large national museums, but also by small local ones, where some unique artifacts can be found