Occupied Cultural Heritage: Ukrainian Artisans Recreate 12 Folk Costumes from Six Russian-Occupied Regions to Showcase to the World

Ukrainian craftsmen have recreated 12 folk historical costumes from six regions of Ukraine occupied by Russia and will show them to the world to prevent the enemy from appropriating cultural heritage, Ukrinform reports. 

A team of more than 20 reenactors and folklore researchers worked for six months to find and recreate women's and men's folk costumes from the now-occupied Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Crimea. They worked for six months on the collection. They chose the most interesting things, beautiful and expensive, specifically to show that Ukrainians who have lived in these territories for centuries were masters of their land.

The recreated items were used to form a collection. Now it will be shown to the world in opposition to Russian propaganda, which is trying to appropriate the Ukrainian cultural heritage of these regions. The collection's shows for 2025 have already been scheduled, and the vast majority will take place abroad, for Ukraine's foreign partners.

‘We've had the idea for this project since 2022, when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and occupation of several regions,’ says Lesia Voroniuk, founder of World Vyshyvanka Day and author of the Occupied Heritage project. 

‘We helped in every possible way to remove items from private collections and received artefacts from the military - they evacuated them from destroyed schools, local village museums and libraries. They did not have time to remove much - especially from the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, from Kherson. No one was preparing for a possible occupation, and museums and private collections were not locked up. Therefore, in these six regions of Ukraine, we have lost a lot of the national heritage of the Ukrainian people: embroidered shirts, authentic clothes, jewellery, towels, icons, household items,’ adds Lesya Voroniuk. 

Russian terrorists burned some things, stole others, and then they appeared in photos from private collections of Russians or collections of Russian state museums. 

‘This is their favourite story, when Ukrainian artefacts are deliberately taken to Moscow, and there they are renamed ‘Russian heritage’ or ‘Little Russian examples of Russian folk culture. That is, in fact, these things are simply stolen and renamed, appropriating what belongs to Ukraine,’ the project author emphasises.

At the same time, according to Lesia Voroniuk, throughout the three years of the full-scale war, partners and foreign colleagues have been asking for Ukrainian heritage from the occupied regions to be displayed abroad. That's why we decided to make replicas and reconstructions of 12 women's and men's uniforms from six Ukrainian regions fully or partially occupied by Russia: Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and the Crimean peninsula.

The project was implemented by the team of the World Vyshyvanka Day NGO with the support of the ALIPH Foundation in cooperation with the Centre for Folklore and Ethnography of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.