Lunchtime Lecture: A Century within a Millennium: How the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra Became a Museum

Founded in 1051, the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra is one of Ukraine's most important religious and cultural sites. It became a museum in 1922, and in 1926 that museum grew into the National Preserve "Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra" - a transformation that profoundly shaped the history of its collections and the ways in which they are understood today. Accompanying the "Sacred Treasures from Kyiv" display, this lecture offers fresh insight into the remarkable history of one of Ukraine's most significant cultural institutions.

Dr Anna Yanenko traces the extraordinary history of the Lavra's collections - from treasures assembled from churches, monasteries and other religious institutions across Kyiv to the dispersal, loss and rediscovery of many objects during the Soviet period. Drawing on new archival research, she reveals how photographs, inventories and historical records are helping to reconstruct the histories of individual objects, including works on display at the V&A today.

Anna Yanenko is Head of the Research Department of the History of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra at the National Preserve "Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra", and a Non-Residential Fellow at French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences in France. She holds a PhD in Archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and her research focuses on the visual history of Ukrainian museums in the 1920s–1930s, the Soviet appropriation of sacred spaces, and provenance studies. She is a member of the Ukrainian Association of Archaeologists and ICOM Ukraine.