Tychyna Museum is 35

January 24 marked the 124th anniversary of Pavlo Tychyna’s birth, and several days later in Kyiv Pavlo Tychyna Literary Memorial Apartment-Museum celebrated its 35th anniversary. Today it is one of the few state museums that actively cooperate with visitors, are open for innovation and various experiments. It is not only in Ukraine that the achievements of the museum are acknowledged. Past year Tychyna Museum became the first non-private state Ukrainian museum that entered the list of the nominees for the 2015 edition of the European Museum of the Year Award (EMYA), organized by the European Museum Forum. The winners will be announced in May in Glasgow, however, the Tychyna Museum has already secured a place in the catalog of the best European museums.

The anniversary of the museum was especially rich for actions and surprises. Poets Borys Oliinyk and Ivan Drach, as well as translator and diplomat Raul Chilachava and noted literary critics, were invited to operate tours. In the evening Yevhen Nyshchuk performed his one-actor show Silver Pigeons in the Sky for the 35th time in the premises of the museum.

According to the head of the museum Tetiana Sosnovska, who is at the same time the great granddaughter of the poet, in spite of the complicated situation in the country, last year the number of visitors considerably grew, and the income increased threefold, although the admission remained the same. At the same time 20 percent of general income came from the sale of souvenirs. The guarantee of the museum’s success is that its employees (for the most part young specialists) are not afraid to exceed the traditional notions. For the past years the museum has realized hundreds of actions and interdisciplinary projects with the target audience of different ages. It became a real communication ground and an area of creative work. The most famous projects of the museum include a night tour with candles “There were times,” the walking tour “Kyiv where Tychyna lived,” authors tours “How I rescued my brother Zhenia from prison,” and “Lida’s day,” image tours, such as “Poetry festival in Tereshchenkivska 5,” etc.

Tychyna Museum positions itself as an honest museum that seeks to recreate as objective portrait of the poet as it is possible, without hiding complicated or ambiguous pages of his life in the time of the Soviet power in Ukraine. “Last year writer Orhan Pamuk, who was presenting his museum at a conference of the European Museum Forum, proclaimed a kind of museum manifesto, which in our opinion is quite unanimous with the principles of our work,” a national correspondent of the European Museum Forum Kateryna Smahlii says. “He said that the museums shouldn’t be assessed according to whether they present in a good or bad way some state, nation, or a certain part of history, but according to whether they reveal humanism. The task of the museum is to tell about the man. In my opinion, the museum must tell us about us as we are these days, as we really are. I am sure that owing to numerous programs realized by Tychyna Museum today we better understand the meaning of humanism, make our society more humane and our country – stronger.”

Activists gathered in the premises of the museum during Maidan events. Another action, remembered since that time, is spreading placards with Tychyna’s quotations about Ukraine, thousands of which were printed, in Maidan.

The museum is open for visitors on a daily basis at 5 Tereshchenkivska St., Apartments 1, 3. Incidentally, if you check in, you will receive a free coffee from the head of the museum.