- Katya Reimann
- Mar 11, 2022
- 1 min read
I saw this article from CNN yesterday: Museums race against time to save Ukraine's cultural treasures.
It seems a timely introduction to my writing piece this week, which is about the Mikhail Kroshitsky Sevastopol Art Museum, which I started writing up as a donation to Wikipedia's current Ukrainian Articles challenge (scheduled last year, before the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2020, and now all too sadly relevant, and even urgent).
I picked the first topic I thought looked interesting, the "The Art Museum in Sevastopol named after M. Kroshitsky," largely because I didn't understand why a museum would be named like that.
Machine translation—that was the answer to that question. My second question, after figuring out that this museum was probably the most important collection of European art in Crimea: who was M. Kroshitsky, and what probably corrupt politics put his name on this building? The answer is not what I was expecting.
Final introductory note: Is Crimea part of Ukraine, or part of Russia? On the whole, I think Crimea is Crimea, and deserves some sort of autonomous rule. I'm not convinced that it is too late, that the indigenous population of Crimean Tatars is too diluted, or any of those arguments. In the modern world, can a small, strategically-located nation survive independently? We are in the process, I think, of finding out—for a nation of 40,000,000 people.
