Stories from Storage

We have witnessed tremendous destruction as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is nothing new, of course. And we don’t need war to have architectural destruction. This photograph shows the demolition of the bell tower of Kyiv's St. Nicholas Cathedral in 1934, a site that has surprising connections to Ukrainian history in the early 20th century.

This "Stories from Storage", while it does feature items from the UHEC archives and museum collections, is a bit unusual. It is a slightly shortened presentation of a talk by Tina Peresunko that she gave in our online programming series in 2021 while she was still in the United States as a Fulbright scholar. She returned to Kyiv in January 2022, and as of March 1 is hunkered down in her hometown of Kyiv as the Russian Army continues its assault.

This fascinating photograph captures a significant part of what the UHEC is about: it tells the stories of Ukrainian immigration to the United States, the lives of those immigrants here, the Ukrainian American communities and organizations (both religious and secular) that they formed, and their interactions with the wider American society.

After living in Prague as a refugee, Oleksii Balabas and his family endured a second war and were displaced yet again. Oleksii finally resettled in the United States, where life was not easy, as can be seen in this heartbreaking letter.