Myronivka museum workers digitize ancient clothes of their region's inhabitants

About 40 samples of folk costumes and 50 samples of interior items from 20 surrounding villages of the Myronivska community were collected by participants of ethnographic expeditions within the framework of the project "HERITAGE. Clothing of Myronivshchyna" project, organized by the Myroniv Local History Museum . The project was supported by the MHP-Hromada Charitable Foundation. During the expedition, the museum workers  talked to about 60 old-timers of the Myronivka community. 

The expeditions started a month ago. In addition to the museum specialists and the film crew,  they included experts, including Volodymyr Shchybria, PhD in History, Director of the Center for Folklore and Ethnography at the Institute of Philology of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, and Natalia Telegay, a researcher at the Ethnology Department of the State Scientific Center for the Protection of Cultural Heritage from Man-Made Disasters, and others. 

According to Inna Savsiuk, director of the Myronivka Museum of Local Lore, the project involves researching, reproducing, and digitizing traditional clothing from the Myronivka region of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that has survived to this day and is in museums and private ownership. The digitized materials are planned to be uploaded to the portal  museum-digital: ukraine, which will allow the collection to be shown to the whole world. In the future , museum workers planned to create a museum website and a virtual map, where  they will cover the entire digitization process and present the collected exhibits online. 

• “Together with Ukrainian contemporary artists, we plan to recreate the traditional costume of the Myronivshchyna region, which we can use for historical reconstructions, exhibitions, festivals, and other cultural and educational products of the museum,” explains Inna Savsiuk. 

This project, as Volodymyr Panchenko, Head of the National Projects Implementation Department at MHP-Hromada Charitable Foundation, commented, is part of a large initiative of the Foundation to strengthen Ukrainian identity, which includes support for the tangible and intangible heritage of Ukraine.

• The project "Heritage. Clothing of Myronivshchyna" project is not only about the unique elements of everyday life in a particular region of Ukraine of the past centuries, it is an initiative that collects stories about the life of people in the Ukrainian village  from eyewitnesses of the flourishing of the culture and traditions of Myronivshchyna. "We are now living in a time of industrialization and urbanization, when the traditions of the Ukrainian village are irrevocably disappearing, and with it the traditions and customs of our people," emphasizes Volodymyr Panchenko, "So it is important today to support initiatives designed to collect and preserve what may become  of great value to us as a nation in times of war.