Experts monitoring the loss of Scythian artefacts have been shocked at scale of theft by Putin’s forces
Fourth century BC golden ceremonial headgear from a Scythian king's burial mound in the Museum of Historical Treasures in Kyiv in September.Fourth century BC golden ceremonial headgear from a Scythian king's burial mound in the Museum of Historical Treasures in Kyiv in September.The people the Greeks called Scythians were formidable warriors and nomads who dominated the Eurasian steppe for more than 1,000 years from about 800BC – long before the creation of national borders.
Some museums managed to move their collections to safety in time. They include Odesa’s archaeological museum and one in Melitopol that holds Ukraine’s most important collection of Scythian gold. Meanwhile Irina Shramko, director of Kharkiv’s archaeological museum, and her colleagues have been spending their nights close to their Scythian and bronze age treasures.
The museum of local lore in Mariupol, which also had an important collection of Scythian gold, was badly shelled in the spring, and in April Russian media announced that about 2,000 objects had been removed from it to the occupied city of Donetsk. They include priceless paintings by Arkhip Kuindzhi and Ivan Aivazovsky.
A section of the Bohorodchany Iconostasis in the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in Kyiv is moved to safety in March.The website includes images of damaged archaeological sites. Telizhenko said that some of the destruction predated the current conflict. Russian troops began building defensive structures on a cluster of bronze age burial mounds near the village in Dovhe in the Luhansk region in 2017, he said. “The integrity of this complex is lost forever,” he said of the 5,000-year-old site.
Hardy said that there had been organised removal efforts by the Russians in territories they had occupied, and looting by Ukrainians and Russians – though mostly by Russians. “There’s a huge problem of legal nihilism in both societies,” he says. “People don’t really feel that the law exists or is implemented fairly.”
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