One of the exhibitions of the project “Religious Communities of Old Bohuslav” – “Engravings by Napoleon Orda: Roman Catholic Churches” – immerses the audience in the Roman Catholic world of the Bohuslavshchyna, where Poles lived since the 11th century. The exhibition is housed in the Bohuslav Roman Catholic Church of St. Wladyslaw, built in the 1920s.
During the soviet era, the church was destroyed: the cupola, the brick rotunda with eight large windows, and the interior columns were demolished, and the building’s interior was looted, redesigned, and adapted for household purposes. Until the 2000s, the building served as a workshop for the production of paving slabs, until the Roman Catholic religious community resumed its activities here. Today, it is under the care of Father Krzysztof Wilk. Together with the parishioners, he continues to restore the building, and the exhibition project “Religious Communities of Bohuslav” draws attention to the urgent need to preserve the church.
“Our generation inherited a ruined and half-destroyed treasure as a result of the soviet occupation, and we must do everything possible to ensure that future generations are able to experience the culture of our ancestors. The restoration of the temple ensures the revival of cultural memory, which in its entirety forms a bridge to the past for our contemporaries, and this bridge serves as the foundation for the future. This is our commitment to the previous and future generations,” commented the exhibition curator, historian Andrii Humeniuk.
The exhibition gives an idea of the appearance of sacred Roman Catholic buildings on the territory of the former Kyiv province through the engravings of Napoleon Orda, who depicted churches in Kyiv, Motovylivka, Bila Tserkva, Ruzhyn, and Bilopillia. The project tells the story of the Poles of Bohuslavshchyna through copies of photographs from the late 19th century and early 20th century and about the Ulm family, who saved Jews during the Holocaust at the cost of their own lives and were canonised by the church (a separate banner on the church’s facade is now dedicated to them). And, it certainly introduces the history of St. Wladyslaw’s Church through preserved photographs of the building, artifacts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries used during worship, and provides free access to the current part of the church.
The exhibition is part of the project “Religious Communities of Old Bohuslav” created by the “Around Us. Ua” NGO. “Religious Communities of Old Bohuslav” includes three thematic exhibitions, the development and presentation of which were made possible due to the implementation of the project “Traditions of Ukrainians. Folk Calendar of Bohuslavshchyna” with the support of the “Partnership for a Strong Ukraine” Foundation.
The array of exhibitions aims to provide information about the churches of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the Bohuslav community and show the images of people from old photographs who could have been their parishioners. Another essential purpose of the exhibitions is to draw attention to the restoration of lost, partially destroyed, and abandoned cultural monuments. The exhibition consists of three blocks: “Orthodox Churches of Bohuslavshchyna”, “Engravings by Napoleon Orda: Roman Catholic Churches”, and “Synagogues of Bohuslav. Forgotten History”.
