04/09/2026
The Foundation to Preserve Ukraine’s Sacral Arts congratulates its colleagues at the Lviv-based Center to Rescue Ukraine’s Cultural Heritage on four years of extraordinary work. From the first days of its inception, the Center has worked tirelessly to safeguard and store museum and sacral artifacts throughout Ukraine; protect Ukraine’s centuries-old wooden churches from fire and destruction; and preserve the Ukrainian cultural identity with its digitization projects and Кава на Професорській (Coffee on Professor Street) lecture series.
The Center was established on March 2, 2022, days after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It was an ad hoc, volunteer initiative of museum professionals, preservationists and Lviv Oblast Council officials that appealed to international organizations, museums and cultural institutions for much-needed equipment and materials to preserve and store museum and sacral artifacts.
By October 2022, the Center had received and distributed three rail cars and four truckloads of packing materials and fire extinguishers coordinated by the Committee for Ukrainian Museums in Warsaw, Poland; these included donations from Blue Shield Denmark & Museumstjenesten, the University Museum of Bergen, Norway, and several museums in Latvia. Seventy-six museums in Ukraine were recipients of this aid, or financial assistance to purchase materials, including in Zaporizhzha, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Baturyn, Kyiv, Poltava, Vynnytsia, Kolomiya and Lviv. This incredible story was covered by The New York Times in the August 8, 2022, article “Rescuing Art in Ukraine with Foam, Crates and Cries for Help” by Jason Farago.
That autumn, an additional 440 water-mist fire extinguishers were distributed by the Center to Ukraine’s historic wooden churches – including the eight churches on the UNESCO World Heritage List of Wooden Tserkvas of the Carpathian Region in Poland and Ukraine – in a joint project of the Foundation to Preserve Ukraine’s Sacral Arts, World Monuments Fund and International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) .
With time, the original members of the Center moved on, and the work of the Center changed. In its next phase the Center began the serious work of digitizing museum and private archives – photographs of churches, architectural drawings, historical documents. In parallel, the Center developed a lecture series on important Ukrainian cultural figures – poet Taras Shevchenko, Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, artist Oleksa Novakivsky – for refugees from Ukraine’s east. The series – Кава на Професорській – held at the Scientific and Technical Library at Lviv Polytechnic Institute, continues to this day.
The Foundation to Preserve Ukraine’s Sacral Arts is proud to sponsor the work of the Center and serve as its partner in the United States.
