Photo: Facebook Oleksandr Alfyorov
As of today, the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade’s banner service has handed over various memorabilia from the front to 45 museums across Ukraine. These include national institutions as well as district museums.
Oleksandr Alfyorov, a historian and officer in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, shared this information with Hromadske Radio.
«In the context of our group, the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade’s banner service, we have transferred collections of monuments of varying significance to 45 museums in Ukraine, from national institutions to even district-level museums», — Alfyorov said.
Recently, Alfyorov helped evacuate a statue of a 12th-century stone Polovtsian warrior from the Pokrovsk direction. This was not the first such find. In August this year, Alfyorov and his team recovered a statue of a stone Cuman woman, weighing approximately 400 kilograms. It was transported to the Dmytro Yavornytskyi Dnipro Historical Museum.
«We delivered the first item on August 14 this year to the Dmytro Yavornytskyi Dnipro Historical Museum. It was a statue of a stone Cuman woman, weighing about 400 kilograms. Six of us managed to lift, transport, and unload it by hand», — Alfyorov recounted.
The recently recovered statue of the Cuman warrior weighs about a tonne and was evacuated from a site approximately 14 kilometers from the front line. According to Alfyorov, volunteers played a crucial role in the recovery. With the help of a tractor, the team successfully transported the statue to Dnipro.
«The statue of the Cuman warrior weighed over a tonne. Thankfully, we found good people to help. The first statue was evacuated 2 kilometers from the frontline, but this time we were 14 kilometers away. We managed to find a tractor to help push the statue because we had spent 2.5 hours doing useless work—it was physically impossible. We didn’t realize the statue was buried about a meter deeper than we thought, which added around 300 kilograms to its weight. In the end, a man with a forklift who happened to be tiling nearby helped us in Dnipro. Everything went smoothly, and all the work was done voluntarily and with a smile, though we were utterly exhausted», — Alfyorov explained.
Alfyorov also outlined the types of historical monuments found on the front line, dividing them into several categories:
«Historical artifacts on the front line fall into these categories. The first are those that need to be evacuated—Russians are destroying our history by attacking museums and local historical exhibits. The second group consists of objects discovered during the construction of fortifications, like burials or remnants of archaeological layers. The third group includes items scattered by explosions, like ceramics uncovered when soil is blasted. Lastly, we have monuments related to current events, which document the presence of occupiers through items like their belongings, magazines, and even empty alcohol bottles», — Alfyorov said.
As a reminder, in 2014, Russia began a large-scale operation to destroy Ukrainian cultural heritage. For almost a decade, these crimes went largely unaddressed, with many historical monuments disappearing without a trace while the world remained silent.
Earlier, on Hromadske Radio, Evelina Kravchenko reported that the most valuable part of the collection from the Tauric Chersonese, a historical and archaeological museum-reserve in Sevastopol, had been taken by the occupiers to Russia. These items were classified as «special goods.»