Ukrainian icons on the walls of the Louvre
In the middle of 2023 a handful of Byzantine icons from a damaged Kyiv museum went on show in Paris. Protecting them and showing them turned out to be the same act.
The Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko Museum in Kyiv was damaged by a blast wave in the first months of the invasion. In 2023 several of its Byzantine-era icons — among the oldest works held anywhere in Ukraine — travelled to Paris and went on display at the Louvre.
Why this was clever
The usual choice in wartime is between hiding a collection and showing it. Hidden, it is safe and forgotten. Shown, it is seen and exposed. This arrangement refused the choice: the works were physically out of danger and simultaneously in front of the largest museum audience in the world.
The unglamorous half
Most heritage protection in this period looked nothing like Paris. It looked like crates, foam, fire blankets and sandbags, much of it supplied by European institutions and by foundations set up for exactly this. It looked like volunteers copying museum databases onto servers outside the country, so that if an object is lost the record of it is not.
What I take from it
A country whose objects are in the Louvre is not a country being erased. That is not sentiment; it is a fact about the archive, and archives outlast the people who attack them.
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