“We removed all the paintings by Kuindzhi, Aivazovsky, Dubovsky, and icons too. I phoned the local history museum and asked them to send us some vehicle. Their answer was, “Hide them [the paintings] as you can”. We decided to strengthen the security alarm system. An electrician came on 25 February. We installed some additional [security alarm] sensors and locked up the museum. The keys are still with me, but I never came to the museum again,” recalls Tetiana Buli, the head of the Kuindzhi Art Museum in Mariupol.
On 24 February, at five o’clock in the morning, my son called me from Kyiv region, from Obukhiv, where I now live. At five o’clock in the morning, he said, “Mum, the war has begun. You and dad need to pack up and leave.” I answered him that we could not leave because I was in the museum. The exhibits had to be evacuated and saved.
In the morning, before eight o’clock, I was already at my work. Although before that, I called our technical staff and asked them not to go to work anymore because we heard some shooting, and it was already dangerous around. Together with other two staff members, the graphic designer and his wife (she was our technical worker too), we removed all the items that were of value in the collection on the ground floor. Those were authentic works by Arkhyp Kuindzhi, Aivazovsky, Dubovsky, as well as some icons, “The Font” painting by Arkhyp Kuindzhi. We prepared all those exhibits for evacuation to the main depository.
I called the director of the museum, said that we were ready and asked her to send us a vehicle. She told me that there would be no vehicle because they could not send it at such a time. She suggested that we should hide the exhibits as we could.
A difficult task to do, but together with our other two staff members, I hid the items well. We found a very good place in the basement of the museum, and we hid everything of value there. We hid those things quite well, as neither marauders managed to get to those exhibits, nor were they destroyed. After that, I was told to lock up the museum, hand in the keys and go home. We parted; we said goodbye near the museum door. But I did not sleep all that night. I realized that something was wrong here. That we needed to undertake something else. The fact is that the security alarm system of our museum was such that there was always a person watching it, either a watchman or one of us, a staff member. So the next morning, very early in the morning too, I tried to contact the security company that provided the security services to us and ask them to send an electrical engineer in order to improve the security alarm system. The girls told me that no one was available there and it was hardly possible to do this.
However, I contacted their director, explained the task, and he said, “We will help you.” So an electrician, the one who always worked with us, (and we are thankful to him for that) Mykola P. Bolobov, came over on 25 February. We spent half a day together with him in order to improve this security alarm system. Additional glass breaking detectors, opening/closing sensors... Then we locked up all the museum doors. I did not give the keys to anyone. They remained with me, and they are with me even now. Unfortunately, after 25 February, I could no longer come to the museum because it was already very dangerous in the city. And, unfortunately, I was already sick.
The fact is that on 23 February I returned to my work after Covid. The war began on 24 February, and those were the days when I was in the post-COVID condition. I was not really able to get up, in fact. Then, all the worst things began. Shelling attacks. In the first days of March, power supply was cut off and telephone connection disappeared, respectively. We all found ourselves in some kind of information vacuum, unaware of what was going on around us. On or around 4 or 5 March, gas supply disappeared too.
This was the fate of all Mariupol residents. Once a day, we heated water on an open fire and cooked some soup. We saved water, and used technical water for drinking. We saved food too, because we did not know how long we would have to save and how long we would have to live in such conditions.
All the time, we hoped that a “green corridor” would be announced. It turned very scary when the bombing of the city became more frequent. It was literally on schedule. At four o’clock in the morning, those planes began to fly, and bombs fell very close by. At ten minutes to four, my husband woke me up and said that we needed to get up and go out into the entrance room (the rule of two walls). I was unable to go down to the basement, obviously, and he did not go down either, as a sign of solidarity. We stayed in the entrance hall. On one of those days, our acquaintances came over to us. They were friends of ours from our youth.
Their home was in the house where Tysiacha Dribnyts (“Thousand Little Things”) store was located. It was very loud there, and they decided that it would be easier for us to be surviving together. This is how we survived together and supported each other. On 11 March, at lunchtime, our men cooked some field soup on an open fire. For some reason, on any of the days, I did not particularly try to direct their actions and order them something. While on that occasion, I stood at the window and shouted, “Hurry up! Come back, inside the flat, quicker!” I do not know why. They said, “Yes, once the water in the kettle boils” – “What are you talking about? Come inside!” As soon as they entered the flat, literally a few seconds later, a bomb fell nearby, in the neighbouring courtyard, onto Podsolnukh (sunflower) store. We live in the 21st micro-district. A third of all the windows in our house shattered at once, and in the house that was closer, both all the windows and all the balconies were probably blown out. At that time, the windscreen of our car was broken too.
Four people, who were cooking dinner in the yard but did not leave on time, died at once. They were slashed with fragments and glass. Later, their bodies were buried in the yard.
There was another strike on our house, at the level of the 7th and 8th floors. Two flats burned down there and two more people died. They were buried in the front garden too. Every morning, we got up with a hope, and I thought to myself, “... contra spem spero (without hope I hope).” Well, we hoped for a “green corridor”. Why? Because we knew how children suffered from being uninformed about what was happening with their parents. And I prayed only for one thing, that is, to see our children. I have two sons, two boys. One of them lives in Kyiv, and the other one lives in Obukhiv. The situation was very hard, obviously. My husband is a very peaceful person, and I did not think that he would be so courageous. Every day, he left home to find out something, to get some information: whether there will be a “green corridor”.
I scolded him for this, saying, “If something happens to you, what will I tell our boys? Don’t leave for too long.” But he still kept leaving.
He would leave in the morning, after breakfast. Our breakfasts and dinners were a thin, see-through sandwich and a cup of tea, and that’s it. So he left home and after some time, he ran back and said, “At 11 o’clock in the morning, there should supposedly be a convoy of cars heading off from Savona. Five minutes to get ready, run out.” So our friends and we rushed out. I must say that by this time, our car was completely damaged, and we could not go by it. The car battery was pierced and all the windows were broken, because after the first bomb hit there was another one, and the car was completely damaged. Thank God, the car of our acquaintances, those who lived at our place, remained in running order. So we got in the car – literally four adults, two small bags and a backpack with documents – and started driving out of our yard. What a nightmare it was…
There were no roads, only some paths. Everything was littered with broken glass, broken power lines, and pieces of bricks. Well, it looked horrible. I don’t know how we managed to get to this Savona store, although it’s not very far. It turned out that there was not any [evacuation] column there. Savona was used as a bomb shelter for civilians. Apparently, there were a lot of incoming strikes there, as there were a lot of burned and shot cars in the neighbourhood. There were not many people there though. So we decided to get out on our own. This was a separate story how we drove through the Park Village, literally along some paths, and saw how terrible it was there. Almost all the houses were destroyed. We managed to reach Myru Avenue, and from there we got to Nakhimov Avenue. Then, in the lower part of Prymorskyi district, we managed to catch up with that column. It was a huge column of about two thousand cars, probably. And it took us a very long time to get out of the city. About four hours, because there was a queue. There were constant traffic jams on narrow streets.
As soon as we got out of the city, mobile telephone signal became available again. We were happy. My husband called our elder son, and I called the younger. We told our children that we were alive and that we were getting out of there. As they said later, they nearly blacked out when they saw “mum” and “dad” on their phone screens.
Then we moved on, along the road of war. That was a corridor along the route Mariupol – Melekine – Mangush – Berdiansk – Tokmak and further to Zaporizhzhia. Our task was at least to reach Tokmak on the first day. We understood that we would not make it to Vasylivka. Somewhere not far from Berdiansk, we saw a huge column of Grad MLRSs that was going to Mariupol. I said to my friend, “Well, they are going to shell what has been left of our city, to destroy our city.” We did not turn to Berdiansk and at that point the column split in two. We moved on. There were those “orc” [derogatory name for russian troops] checkpoints all along the way. Those people warned us that we had to get somewhere before the curfew, and we understood that it was very important, because we saw so many burned and shot cars along those roads of war...
You know, this staggered me and probably left an impact for a long time. It will stay in my memory for a long time. A passenger car in the ploughed soil. The fact is that it was cold then, and the fields were frozen. Apparently, a driver of this car saw a moving tank in front and decided to hide in the field, but they shot him there. They shot this car some 50 metres away from the road. How do I know those were tanks? I saw the imprints from the tank tracks on the side of the road. We then saw some more burned cars, a discarded child car seat, and children’s shoes. Well, that was a nightmare. We were very afraid that we would not make it to Tokmak before the curfew. Literally at five minutes past six, we were at the entrance to Tokmak.
We were amazed by those people, they were volunteers. Warm-hearted Ukrainian people. How they met us, received, warmed, and fed us. They understood from what hell and what hunger we escaped.
We spent the night in the building of the kindergarten. Although it was already quite late, local women still kept bringing some saucepans with food, with soup, in order to feed evacuees. And refugees kept coming. They did not expect that there would be so many people, yet they tried their best to feed everyone. We spent the night in the kindergarten, and in the morning, those women brought us some food again. They brought even some pancakes, some fluffy pancakes, because it was the Pancake Week (Masnytsia feast), and they wanted to feed us and warm us with a kind word. We are extremely thankful to them for that.
Tokmak was already occupied then. We are very grateful to those people, those wonderful women. We left there with tears in our eyes. Then we had to move on to Vasylivka, and we knew that on the way to Vasylivka, bridges were damaged, and we would have to make our way. There were minefields nearby. And there was another huge traffic jam for four hours there. Volunteers escorted our column, dividing it in parts, to take us through those challenging places with the minefields. We all waited there. They escorted some part of the cars, then came back, took some more cars and went again. That way they escorted the entire column through some ravine where everything was mined. That’s how we moved through Vasylivka and then got to Zaporizhzhia. The first Ukrainian checkpoint was along the way, not far from Zaporizhzhia. We were happy to see our guys, our military, our Armed Forces of Ukraine. It was a great happiness.
And, by the way, in Zaporizhzhia, in Epicentre store, there was a huge volunteer centre where help was offered to all those who arrived. We decided not to stay over in Zaporizhzhia. We just checked in; we had our car registered there. They registered us thoroughly, wrote down the car licence plates in order to know who went through the “green corridor”, who arrived, and who survived. The next day we learned that the tail of the column had come under fire, and five cars had been fired upon. There were some wounded there. I don’t know if anybody was killed. Basically, what I’d like to say, when we were leaving through the “green corridor”... Well, the “green corridor” means a humanitarian corridor, but there was no ceasefire.
When we walked out of our flat in Mariupol, Grad MLRS rockets were flying over our heads. It was so noisy and so loud. It seemed that the only safer place was our flat, and that’s where we needed to go back.
However, the decision was made, so we did not come back. So there was a “green corridor”, but there was no ceasefire regime. This is how we got to Zaporizhzhia and then to Dnipro. We rested in Dnipro for one night and one day, and then another night, and in the morning of the next day, we took to the road again. Our friends had to go to their children, and we planned to go to ours. They took us to Uman, and our son met us there. He was waiting for us there. And so, on 18 March, we came to Obukhiv in Kyiv region, where we have been until now. Later I learned that on 2 March our museum, the Art Museum, was hit by bombing, and the wall on the ground floor collapsed.
Then, on or around 20 March, another bomb fell, apparently, close to the museum. Well, the roof of the museum building was swept off, and all the windows shattered. I saw the damaged facade of our museum, but the building was not destroyed by fire. The building remained, and everything that was inside it survived.
A real tragedy occurred in the local history museum. Their building burned down, and our entire collection stored in the local history museum burned down too. Our main depository of exhibits was in the building of the local history museum, and it burned to the ground. The walls were... well, just bricks remained, and that’s all. Everything was destroyed by fire there, including our collection. We had such wonderful works, such nice paintings there… My God! We had an excellent representation of all the art schools of Ukraine. Those were the works from the second half of the 20th century, and from the 21st century. We had a collection of works by such artists as Glushchenko. We had works by Marchuk and Yablonska, by Zakharov, Nepyipyvo, and Deregus. These are some outstanding names in landscape painting. We had a wonderful collection from the Transcarpathian School.
Even now, I seem to see these painting before my eyes, but they are gone. They are lost irretrievably; they are lost forever. It is a terrible loss. It is a whole cultural stratum that perished in the fire of war.
As for those paintings that my colleagues and I hid on 24 February, they remained intact, but collaborators passed them over to the so-called DPR (unrecognized Donetsk People’s Republic), to the Museum of Local Lore in Donetsk. I do not know their further fate. This is a big grief too. I think that our museum was such a bright art platform in the city, and during eleven and a half years of our work, we held a lot of interesting events. We brought some European paintings to the city, paintings of the 17th and 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. We had interesting inter-museum exhibitions, all-Ukrainian projects, as well as international projects. Once every five years, we organized the “Memorial of [Arkhyp] Kuindzhi”. The last one was in June 2021, in honour of the next anniversary of Arkhyp Kuindzhi.
All this has been lost. It’s all gone. This is a big pain.
It is very difficult to remember the museum, because my colleagues and I are the ones who opened it first. In 2005, I was entrusted, so to speak, to prepare an art museum for opening. It opened its doors in 2010. It worked for eleven and a half years, and then this war came. The war – and the city does not have an art museum again. As for our colleagues, the museum personnel, some of them stayed there (some attendants and technical staff), others were able to leave, someone is in Germany, someone is in Scotland, and someone is in Lviv. I keep in touch with people who got out of Mariupol. We text and phone each other, and we support each other. Our Art Museum was a branch of the local history museum, so the number of staff was small.
The team of researchers included me, as the head of the branch, and the head of the museum collections Natalya Kurionysheva, who is my closest colleague. She was less fortunate, as her mother died in March, and she could not bury her. On 1 April, Natalya received a very serious injury – a shrapnel wound to the head. Her eardrums were burst, and she also got shrapnel wounds to her arms and her back. She was taken to Russia and ended up in Kursk. There she received some medical treatment and was operated on, and after that she had nowhere to go. She called me and said,
“Tanya, in Ukraine I have no one but you.” I told her, “Come over, Natalya.”
She came and we lived in Obukhiv together for three months. But then she found some distant relatives in Scotland who invited her there. On 2 September, she left for Scotland. It’s good because it’s quiet there. She’s been through a lot. I hope she gets some treatment and rehabilitation there. She is my closest colleague. On Ukrainian [government-controlled] territory, our museum is headed by Oleksandr Gore, the former head of the exhibition department at the local history museum. We cooperate with him. I’m still in charge of the Art Museum.
All my pain is about Yevhen P. Skorlupin, who died on one of those days. Sick people, people with diseases, died in those days and in those conditions, without access to medical care. I know that Oleksandr G. Bondarenko left Mariupol. He is in Dnipro now and is engaged in some creative work. He participates in some exhibitions. Serhiy A. Barannik left too. He told us how terrible it all was. He was in the city to the last.
He stayed there with his painting works; he didn’t want to leave them. Then, when his flat burned down, he was with a kitten in the shelled city. He managed to escape then.
Now he is in Stryi town, Lviv region. He is also engaged in some art work and participates in exhibitions. Our graphic designer, who worked with us, is a professional artist. Vasyl M. Korenchuk. He is the one who helped me hide the paintings then. He and his wife are in Lviv. Every day, he paints in the open air (en plein air). He paints some interesting works and sends me the pictures. By the way, he took part in the auction in support of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The auction was held in Kyiv. Yuriy S. Kondratenko, as far as I remember, he is in Chernihiv region. He had been the permanent secretary of the Mariupol branch of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine. Unfortunately, I don’t know about other artists. I know about those who remained in Mariupol: Oleh B. Kovalev, Oleksand G. Shpak, they are there.
I learned about the death of Mr Burov when I was still in Mariupol, that is, before 15 March. This information came to me then. I am very sorry. I have known Serhiy D. Burov since 1994 or 1995, when his first programs about Mariupol were released, and I participated in filming of these programs. In the same period, I met Viktor Y. Dedov, who was his all-time operator. We had close ties with Serhiy Burov and Viktor Dedov in the sphere of creative art. On Saturdays, they very often visited our museum in order to film some material about the exhibition that was on display, about the artists who presented their works. It was very nice because they left a video archive.
Serhiy D. Burov passed me the footage then and I kept the video archive. Unfortunately, he died. He remained there, in Mariupol. Serhiy Burov was an intelligent person of a very fine nature, very smart, and a very creative soul. Viktor Dedov was highly professional. The brightest memories of them remain in my mind. It is a big pain that such people passed away because of the horrible, unnecessary and terrible war.
Our city, our dear home will definitely be de-occupied, by all means. It cannot be otherwise. There must be justice in the world. It’s hard to remember the city now. It feels like something dear that remained there behind. But everything will be fine and we will win. Glory to Ukraine!
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