Sloboda Ukraine Code. Church Antiquities

“Sloboda Ukraine Code. Church Antiquities” is a project of the M. F. Sumtsov Kharkiv Historical Museum in partnership with the NGO KLIO HUB, supported by the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation.

The main aim of the project is to digitise a unique collection of church relics of the 17th–20th centuries and to create a modern digital cultural product open to a wide audience in Ukraine and abroad. The project was carried out with the NGO KLIO HUB in partnership with the Korolenko Kharkiv State Scientific Library.

The project produced a digital multimedia catalogue of the museum collection: icons, liturgical books and other objects of church worship. It includes monuments of Ukrainian Baroque, artefacts connected with Cossack history, and objects that show the religious diversity of the region — Catholicism, Old Believers, Judaism, Karaism, Islam and Buddhism.

A separate result is a virtual 3D exhibition, on the web and as an app for VR devices. It lets visitors explore the artefacts in a digital environment wherever they are.

The project is based on the collection from the holdings of the M. F. Sumtsov Kharkiv Historical Museum — important evidence of the spiritual history of Sloboda Ukraine. Many of these objects come from pre-war Kharkiv museum collections, survived the evacuation during the Second World War and have been preserved as a unique source of cultural memory.

Press release of the project (PDF, in Ukrainian)