Archaeologist Timur Bobrovsky found in the catalog of the State Historical Museum in Moscow dozens of items from the Kyiv-Pechersk Museum-Reserve, which in the 1930s were seized by the Bolsheviks and were considered irretrievably lost.
He reported this on Facebook, LB.ua informs.
In 2001, the curator of the funds of the Kyiv-Pechersk Nature Reserve Hryhory Polyushko published a monograph "Lost treasures of the Lavra Museum" with a catalog of valuable items that the Soviet government transferred from the Museum's funds to the state repository of values of the USSR.
These were mainly liturgical items that were requisitioned in the 1920s from the vestry of St. Sophia and Assumption Cathedrals in Kyiv, which were turned into museums with the arrival of the Soviets. The State Treasury seized valuables under the pretext of “safe storage”, but in the early 1940s, most of them disappeared into the basements of state banking institutions.
Polyushko found that at least 11 items ended up in the State Historical Museum in Moscow. Still, they said that “the accounting documentation does not contain information about the receipt of exhibits from the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra.”
Bobrovsky said that he decided to compare the photos from the “Polyushko catalog” with the catalog on the DIM website.
“And then it started... Of the 119 items listed in the catalog according to the data of the 1930s, I was able to identify 57 “Kyivan” items among the materials of this site, of which at least four dozen were considered lost forever. And I only looked through a part of the digitized collection," the archaeologist said.