Interview with the director of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra for the Museum of Civilian Voices by Rinat Akhmetov Foundation.

In spring, the Kyiv City History Museum hosted the VOICES exhibition, a multidimensional exhibition based on true stories of Ukrainians about the war collected by the Museum of Civilian Voices by Rinat Akhmetov Foundation. The museum collects and stores the world's largest collection of first-hand accounts of the war in Ukraine - more than 120,000 stories.

As part of the exhibition, a public interview was held with Maksym Ostapenko, Director General of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra National Reserve, PhD in History.

Maksym Ostapenko is an expert in the field of historical and cultural monument protection, museology, archeology, and restoration work. He became the head of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra National Reserve in 2023. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, he has been in the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

From 2007 to 2022, he headed the Khortytsia National Reserve. He is the author of more than 30 scientific works on the history of Khortytsia Island and the Lower Dnipro region, co-author of the study and restoration of unique underwater heritage sites.

Public interviews as part of the VOICES exhibition opened a series of cultural events by the Museum of Civilian Voices by Rinat Akhmetov Foundation aimed at preserving the memory of the war.

The conversations are moderated by Anastasiia Platonova, a cultural critic, cultural analyst and curator of this series of events.

Anastasiia Platonova: As a person with a professional, thorough historical education, what do you think about the memorialisation of the war that is happening to us right now, without any time, emotional, or other distance? How do you look at this process, what painful points and issues do you see?

Maksym Ostapenko: Our memory is such a strange thing that allows us to be, allows our society to feel complete. The war that is happening now is largely a war for our memory. Or rather, for its cleansing. Our enemy pays much more attention to historical memory and our identity than we used to. Not only is there a kinetic war going on now, but we are in the midst of a semantic war. The politics of memory, the politics of rethinking our mission, our place in the world, which is now taking place through pain and suffering, is changing us and our awareness. Therefore, we need to pay much more attention to memorialisation at the state level. I understand that it is very difficult to do this now against the backdrop of news from the frontline, the dead and the suffering that is taking place. But it is precisely for memory that the war is being waged. And each of us has to become a data bank, an information bank that will carry our personal memory.

The Civilian Voices project has already collected over 120,000 interviews, which is an incredible contribution to how memory should continue to exist. Because after the war, the objects of historical memory and memorialisation must begin to heal and become the basis for the revival and birth of a new Ukraine. We understand that we will never be the same as we were before the war. And this is our duty to those who will no longer be able to remember. But we must remember them. I have already lost 11 people I know in this war. What should I do to remember them? How do I make sure that their feat or their lives are preserved for future generations and become the foundation for building something they dreamed of? It is memory that can make of us the people who will change Ukraine.

Anastasiia Platonova: How do you see the main issues of the memorialisation environment? What do you think are the key pulsating points, the key topics that are most important now?

Maksym Ostapenko: There is a very important moment of personal and individual memory, which is already imprinted here not far away on the walls of St Michael's Cathedral and St Michael's Monastery. Spontaneously, people have created this wall of memory, which is already completely filled. Now we face a huge challenge: how to remember everyone? Because a lot of people who came to this wall, on the one hand, see all this incredible pain, and on the other hand, they want everyone's name not to be forgotten. And what arose spontaneously needs to be turned into something systemic, something that will remind us, inspire us to some extent, and become a warning to be different.

Anastasiia Platonova: What should this something be and who should be its creator? How should it appear?

Maksym Ostapenko: Back in 2015, an important document was adopted on the creation of the National Pantheon, which was supposed to revive the full-fledged memory not only of military heroes, but also of scientific and cultural figures, and spiritual leaders. It seems to me that the system and the whole topic of pantheons, both at the regional and national level, is extremely relevant now. We recently spoke to Anton Drobovych (head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory - Ed.), and he said that the first step towards creating this pantheon in the context of the events of the current war is to fully rethink the wall of memory that was in St. Michael's Monastery and create something similar in Kyiv, but at a different conceptual level. I want this form to be conditionally eternal - I understand that there is no such thing as eternal in the world, but it should be something so durable and high quality that we would not be ashamed of those people who gave their lives.

It seems to me that the first step in memorialising the military is to find this form of national pantheon, where it will be, in what format. This should be a professional discussion, but the most important thing is to hear the opinion of the military. On the one hand, we need to find forms that will be in line with our tradition, and on the other hand, we need to make it really understandable not only for our society. Because through the honouring of heroes, we have to broadcast our values and unbreakable will, which has now surprised the whole world. I would like to remind you that the whole world gave us how many days? I think it was three to five. But this did not happen thanks to those people who sacrificed themselves. And we need to explain this to the world: why this happened, why the whole world was wrong about Ukraine. A universal form must be found - for Ukrainians who knew these people, who want to find a familiar name, who want to leave flowers or things that belonged to these people there. And the form that will be found should be understandable to the whole world.

Objects of memorialisation, pantheons, are a kind of state myth. This is a certain ideological myth of any state, on which both social policy and relations in society are based. The trajectory of a society's development often depends on how well the forms are found. We can see what Russia has turned the heroism of the Second World War into by using semi-fascist methods of memorialisation.

Anastasiia Platonova: They say "we can do it again", right?

Maksym Ostapenko: Exactly. Although in fact, most veterans of the Second World War dreamed that this would never happen again. But they managed to turn a plus sign into a minus. And we have to take this into account as well. Unfortunately, there are not many successful memory and memorialisation projects in Ukraine that will be relevant in 20-50-100 years. And in the case of national pantheons, we are talking not about decades but centuries. We have to understand that this war, given the number of victims, deaths, and suffering, should teach us. Not only our generation, but also the next ones. And not just to teach, but to inspire and shape at the same time. Such places should turn into points of shaping the future: we have to bring a child there and he or she should leave differently.

Anastasiia Platonova: Do you have a feeling that Ukraine, which has been in the Great War for three years now, is beginning to develop new, thorough approaches to memorialisation? How do we do this?

Maksym Ostapenko: I would like to believe that we will find forms that will be worthy of the people we honour. This is a super-task. There are many examples of unsuccessful memorialisation. There are only a few examples of memorialisation that touches people to the core for centuries. We need to work on this. We cannot do without experts, without people who understand trends, who have a sense of the future based on the experience of the past. We have to go back to certain depths, because the tradition of memorialisation is not new.

The institution that I have the honour to head now, the Pechersk Lavra, is actually about memorialisation. This is the Assumption Cathedral: the largest necropolis was around it, and the largest number of prominent figures of the Princely era, the Lithuanian period, the times of the Commonwealth, and Cossack Ukraine of the 19th and 20th centuries were buried in the Assumption. This is an object that should always have inspired Ukrainians to move forward, but it has been systematically cleared away. It was turned into an object of memorialisation of the idea of the Russian world. Anything that did not correspond to this idea was removed. My colleagues and I came to the conclusion that such sites as the Lavra, Sophiia, Ancient Chernihiv and several others are not just memorial museum objects. They are national shrines. It is these objects that emerged thousands of years ago that should continue to inspire us, help us find the right forms. Because all this time, people have been accumulating experience - how to honour prominent figures, spiritual leaders, warriors. It is encoded in these monuments. I think that they will be the best guides.

If we start to look at the Lavra not as the epicentre of the Russian world, but remember that our thousand-year history is there, and look at how it happened in those days, then certain elements and formats will be found. This is a question for people who create new things. St Anthony, who went to Kyiv hill where there was nothing, made a vision of what should appear here, and it worked for a thousand years. We still honour St Anthony. This should happen to our memory.

I really believe that the suffering of the war has already given birth to such people. We just need to create a platform for them to express themselves and their creativity, so that they can create projects that would touch the heart. This is such a relevant story, so much so that it is felt by the whole society, that we just have to listen to our prophets. Someone once listened to St Anthony, provided him with land and resources, and people came to him - and today we see the Lavra. The same story is possible now. Somewhere near us is someone who will create an object that will be remembered for centuries and people will come to it. We have to look for prophets in our midst.

The only caveat: unfortunately, there is no demand for strategic thinking in Ukraine. We need to find formats of interaction between us: civil society, experts, government officials, so that we can start shaping our strategies and visions. It's not about six months, a year, or five years. We have to find platforms that can form strategic guidelines, and on these guidelines we will return to the war of memory, to the semantic war, to those strategic issues that are really very necessary, and this is part of our victory and the key to our future.

Anastasiia Platonova: What are the strategic approaches to the memorialisation of politics and memory practices, what are the most successful practices of European and other countries that can help us here at the level of contemplation of how post-war societies transform war experiences into knowledge and memory?

Maksym Ostapenko: There are so many memorial sites in the world that inspire people regardless of their nationality or religious preferences. I have seen one of the best memorialisation traditions in Britain. Starting with national, extremely powerful monuments that are made at an incredible artistic level, with an incredible philosophical depth of images, and ending with commemorations in communities, in churches, in facilities. If there is a military unit, it necessarily has memorials to those who served and, for example, died in this unit in wars. Through the levels from the state, this goes down and reaches the average person.

I have a friend whose name is Jerry. He is proud of the memory of his great-grandfather, who was a participant in the First World War. In his house, he has a display in a place of honour with items that personally belonged to his great-grandfather. This lineage can be traced in the fact that Jerry takes part in the parades of the unit where his great-grandfather once served. It is allowed to wear awards that belonged to his great-grandfather or other family members at ceremonies. Everything is thought out and society supports it. I often asked my students or those to whom I gave lectures on the history of weapons about their relatives, their grandfathers, great-grandfathers, who fought in the Second World War. Of course, almost everyone fought in the war. I asked the question: how many weapons do you have left, for example, a sabre, a bayonet, a sword, - something that belonged to your grandfather personally, that has no utilitarian value, but is a kind of symbol of a warrior? What do you have left? No one raised their hand. And this is an indicator that the Soviet system has been cleaning up any natural things and commemorations for almost 70 years.

Anastasiia Platonova: How many of us women have a grandmother's chest? How many of us have our great-grandmothers' embroidered shirts, corals, trophy weapons of our ancestors, and so on? These are severed roots. And they are cut off consciously. I will talk about this as many times as I can.

Maksym Ostapenko: Absolutely right. And that's why we have to bring this story back from the state level, the regional level, the community level, and down to the individual. It is very important for people to understand that they are part of this path, that they are part of this system, that their loved one has done something outstanding in history, and they should remember it and pass it on to their future generations. The key role is to combine the big with the small and make it united.

Anastasiia Platonova: We are at the point of creating not only new national policies, practices of memory, and strategic approaches to memorialisation, but all of this is part of a large new national myth. And so we can talk about serious social transformations. Do you agree?

Maksym Ostapenko: I believe that without the formation of a new Ukrainian identity, we are doomed. Even if we win the war. If we don't rethink our past, if we don't rethink our traumatic events of the present, if we don't connect ourselves to our roots, which go back a thousand years - the same Lavra and Sophiia and other objects are manifestations and proofs of our historical memory and our genetic connection with this history - we are doomed. Therefore, history and memory are of great importance. That is why the Russian perverts led by Putin are turning memory and history not just into a tool, but into a terrible genetic weapon. That is, to wipe out memory and get an absolute preference to give the final say on who should remember what. It is terrible when people at this level try to turn memory into a weapon of literal mass destruction.

Anastasiia Platonova: During the war, cultural institutions revealed their fantastic importance as a network of subjective institutions that maintain the cultural environment, sometimes replacing the state, and pursue not only survival practices but also development strategies. How does this happen with the Lavra? What challenges, issues, and opportunities does the Lavra currently see in the context of wartime memorialisation?

Maksym Ostapenko: I have been involved with the Lavra for the last year, but before that I had been planning to be a combat medic for 14 months and was preparing for something completely different. When I got the chance to lead the Lavra, I realised that I had to become a kind of "sponge" for rethinking the history I knew. I studied a lot of things related to the Lavra of this period and the monuments of the Lavra, but it was never my speciality. And in a very limited time, I had to absorb an incredible amount of information about the past in order to understand what to do with the future today. And it was a challenge.

When my colleagues and I began to analyse the Lavra as a unique phenomenon, as a national shrine that has shaped the space around it for a thousand years, we were amazed. And we found terms to explain the significance of the Lavra for Ukrainian society. The first point is that the Lavra will be a thousand years old in just a quarter of a century. In 2051, we will celebrate the first millennium of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. The state, all of us, the staff, the reserve, the whole society, and the church must prepare for this. Prepare in a different way than Kyryl and other representatives of the Russian world envisioned. This is the first challenge.

The second challenge is the realisation that the Lavra is not a museum, it is not a reserve, it is not just a monastery, it is not just an architectural or archaeological monument. It is something much more, and we have come to the term "national shrine". This term exists in the world. These are objects that form the ideological basis of the state, society, and sometimes have a huge impact on the whole world. For example, in Italy, there is no need to explain the importance of the Vatican. Imagine removing the Vatican from Italy. Impossible, yes. If you want to imagine Italy, you imagine the Vatican. Although de jure, it is not even part of Italy. Through these steps, we began to think about the Lavra's mission in the past and what it should be in the future. And we found a unique, I think, tool. We called it the Lavra Cross. This is a conventional name, but it is important for understanding what the Lavra was for our ancestors, for us, and what it will be in the future. It is the epicentre of the spirit. It was born in the Lavra, broadcast thoughts, ideas, formed huge influences around it, and the Lavra's activities Christianised almost the whole of Eurasia.

We began to think about what else the Lavra gave us. As for the state, the manifestation of will, they were also in the Lavra. Who is our first canonised warrior? Ilya Murovets or Muromets, as Russia calls him. He was buried in the Lavra. From our prominent statesmen, such as Konstiantyn Ostrozkyi, Mazepa, and many others, we see manifestations of will that were in the Lavra. Who was our first scholar? Nestor the Chronicler. And through Yelysey Pletenetskyi, through Petro Mohyla, through the creation of University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, science was born. Our first canonised artist, Alipiy, where was he? In the Lavra. Where is he buried? In the Lavra. And through Kovnir, through many artists who have worked in the Lavra for centuries, we reach Shevchenko and Yizhakevych, we reach Mariia Prymachenko, who also left her fantastic manifestation and her work in the Lavra. We can see at least four directions, what we call "faith, will, creativity and thinking", which were born in the Lavra and pulsated for thousands of years. And the point of this rise was the era of the Ukrainian Cossack Baroque, the time of Petro Mohyla, when the Lavra, in fact, after the ruin, or in the time of ruin, re-founded Ukraine and created what we know as the highest manifestation of Ukrainian identity, when we fought on the one hand, and on the other hand, we created something new, and we still remember it.

The rethinking of the Lavra that we have now launched will allow us to bring the Lavra back into the orbit of the Ukrainian world, the Ukrainian pantheon in the broadest sense of the word. On the other hand, it should become a place of formation of spiritual values, traditions of warriorhood, traditions of culture, art, and all those things that have been pulsating in the Lavra and should continue to do so. That is why we want to consider the Lavra, based on the past, as a platform for shaping the future of Ukraine. Everyone should have a space in their life where they enter one way and leave another. Take Masada in Israel: every child at the age of 16 has to come to this place, where fierce battles between the Israelites and the Romans took place, and honour their ancestors who did the unimaginable here and all died. It happens that a person comes as one and leaves as another.

Imagine the space from the Park of Glory in Kyiv. Then you walk along - the Holodomor Museum, then the Savior on Berestova Street, the Monomakhovych tomb, then Lavra, Mazepa buildings, then Gonchar Museum, Mystetskyi Arsenal, then St Theodosius Monastery, then Resurrection Church, then the World War II Museum, this space ends with Mother Ukraine. But all of these are disconnected, unconnected objects that represent Ukraine at the most important, dramatic historical points. This line is called the Golden Mile of Kyiv, a term that originated in the 18th and 19th centuries. We call this space the Diadem of Ukrainian Glory.

Once you get into this space, moving from the Park of Glory to Mother Ukraine or in the opposite direction, if you shape this route correctly, you can come out a completely different person. Even if you knew nothing about the history of Ukraine. This can turn into a certain point of transformation for our people, so that they understand what it is. What it means to fight, to live for Ukraine, what it was in the past and what it should become in the future. Through the Lavra, we felt that this space could transform the whole of Ukraine in the first way. We have drawn this, perhaps, ambitious goal somewhere in our minds, and we feel how much it is working for people.

It is very important to understand that St Antony, St Theodosius, Ilya Murovets, Nestor the Chronicler, and Mazepa were ordinary people, just like you and me. And this feeling that you too can do no less should begin to shape a new formation of Ukrainianness.

Anastasiia Platonova: Now, being in the field of memorialisation, which is being created here and now, have you rethought anything for yourself, as a professional historian, as the head of a cultural institution, about the possibilities of art as a tool for memorialisation here and now?

Maksym Ostapenko: You probably know this topic: icons on ammunition boxes. On Mother's Day, we opened a small exhibition in the Bell Tower dedicated to the Mother of God, based on these icons. This is a fairly well-known project, and I thought it would be an ordinary story. But when I saw these images, it really takes you to such a depth... You realise that each box was brought not just as an ammo box, it is actually the content of the fighting. Terrible things happened there. And this object has turned into something that makes you stand for a long time and rethink everything you have felt before. And it is seen, it is broadcast to many people. These are the new forms that the present moment gives us, and it really has to change us.

Through various artistic practices, we saw how it changed the military personnel who came to the Lavra for a spiritual recovery programme and were given the opportunity to start painting an icon. On the one hand, it was relaxation for them, and on the other hand, at that moment a person begins to enter a completely different state, which he or she may have never been in before. And this transformation of traumatic experience into incredible creativity is now a very important moment and it is very important not to lose it. Through artistic exploration and forms, we can, on the one hand, give these people an incredible sense of connection to history, and on the other hand, it will and should serve as a kind of rehabilitation for those who have been through it.

It is important to understand how to help people returning from war or civilians who have gone through traumatic experiences not to withdraw, but to allow them to create something positive out of the huge minus they have experienced, because plus and minus are not separate. The main thing is that the person does not stop. And creativity, artistic things are just that endless well that will inspire us and make us interesting to the world. Because people in the world don't have such experiences nowadays. In addition, creativity and artistic expression will give an incredible boost to Ukrainian culture. They are already giving it. And it is very important to find a mechanism of interaction, support and connection between society and those people who need to express themselves in such creative and artistic things.