NEWS AND VIEWS: Frescoes return to St. Michael Golden Domes Cathedral in Kyiv (01/04/04)

NEWS AND VIEWS

Frescoes return to St. Michael Golden Domes Cathedral in Kyiv

by Prof. Volodymyr Bakum

As we have been informed by the Ukrainian press and Dr. Serhiy Kot of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, specialists of Ukraine and Russia have finally agreed that an additional seven frescoes, currently at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, do indeed belong to the plundered art treasures of St. Michael of the Golden Domes Cathedral in Kyiv.

The meeting of the joint commission was held at the Heritage on October 1-3. Four years had elapsed since the last meeting held in October 1999, at which a partial victory had been achieved with the return of four frescoes to Kyiv in March of 2001.

However, as St. Andrew's Ukrainian Orthodox Society, a member of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the U.S.A., had informed the Ukrainian community in August 2001, the Russian specialists continued to claim that the additional frescoes Ukraine was asking to be returned were not part of St. Michael's art treasures. They demanded further proof and detailed documentation. The Ukrainian researchers had no choice: either comply and provide the required documents or lose a very valuable part of Ukraine's cultural heritage forever. They decided to continue their work. But to do that they needed money. Unfortunately, the Ukrainian government was unable to provide them with the necessary funds.

St. Andrew's Society offered to help and launched an urgent appeal for funds in late summer 2001. The Ukrainian community responded magnificently and donated generously. Members of all religious denominations sent in their contributions. The late Sophia Chopivska donated $5,000 to the cause, and there were many others who felt that it was their duty to help raise the needed funds.

The money received went toward financing repeated trips to Russia, Germany, and the United States to conduct the necessary research in the various archives and museums of these countries. The painstaking investigation followed the path of St. Michael's art treasures from their removal from the walls of the cathedral, prior to its destruction by the Soviet government in 1937, through their shipment to Germany by the German military authority, their return to the Soviet military authority by the U.S. army command after Nazi Germany surrendered in 1945, and from then on through a multitude of Russian cities and museums to their final destination, the Russian National Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, where they are presently housed.

Some details are in order: In 1943, the Nazis, who had seized the entire St. Michael's collection of 26 frescoes and mosaics when they occupied Kyiv in 1941, sensing that the tide of the war was turning, shipped them to Höchstädt, in Bavaria. There they remained until the American military authority, anxious to return to their rightful owners the thousands of art treasures plundered by the Nazis all over the world, brought them to Munich and then turned them over to the Russian military authority in the Soviet zone of occupation. Not surprisingly, the Russians shipped them straight to Russia, in spite of the fact that both German and American military records indicated that they came from St. Michael's of the Golden Domes.

Their first stop was the museum of Pushkino (formerly and now again Tsarskoye Selo), near St. Petersburg. From there they were sent to Novgorod, where an expertise as to their origin was performed in 1952. In 1953, 11 of the 18 frescoes were transferred to St. Petersburg.

The paper trail followed by the Ukrainian researchers is even more impressive: over ninety museums, collections and archives were visited and consulted throughout Germany and Russia.

At the National Archives in Washington, the research was done by Prof. Patricia Kennedy Grimsted of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, who deserves a big word of thanks. Over 600 dossiers and records were thoroughly studied in search of the proof that all of the 11 frescoes sent to St. Petersburg from Novgorod in 1953 were from St. Michael's.

The documents presented by the Ukrainian commission at the October meeting proved beyond any doubt that the additional seven frescoes the Russians claimed as their own belonged to St. Michael's cathedral. The Russian members of the joint commission acknowledged that fact and stated that much in a joint protocol signed by both sides. This opens the way for the prompt return of the seven contested frescoes to Kyiv in the near future. An additional meeting held in December of 2003 was expected to finalize the agreement.

Other meetings, concerning the fate of another 15 frescoes and mosaics of St. Michael's still in museums of the Russian Federation, are planned.

The Ukrainian members of the joint commission were Serhiy Kot, Olena Serdiuk and Valentyna Vrublevska. The research and investigations were led throughout these years by Dr. Kot, who was named chairman of the Research Center for the Return and Restitution of Cultural Treasures and by Prof. Yuriy Koreniuk of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts.

We owe them a debt of gratitude for their untiring efforts. They, in turn, have asked us to thank once again the Ukrainian community in the diaspora for its generous financial support, without which their work could not have been successful completed.

Volodymyr Bakum is secretary of St. Andrew's Ukrainian Orthodox Society, based in Rutherford, N.J., and professor of French Language Studies at the Center for International Programs at the State University of New York at New Paltz and faculty director of the Center's Paris Summer Program.

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