Ukrainian Museum-Archives
Near Cleveland, Ohio
In the Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland, a turn-of-the-century house holds one of the most important collections of Ukrainian cultural material outside of Ukraine itself. The museum-archives grew out of a project begun in nineteen fifty-two by Leonid Bachynsky, a Ukrainian scholar turned machinist who had fled Soviet-occupied Ukraine after World War Two. Bachynsky understood that the Soviet regime was actively destroying Ukrainian cultural artifacts, books, and newspapers, and began collecting anything he could find related to the immigrant experience and to Ukraine's suppressed history.
Cleveland was a natural home for the project: the city's Tremont district had been the center of a thriving Ukrainian immigrant community since the early twentieth century. The museum opened formally in nineteen seventy-seven and today holds one of the largest archives of Ukrainian immigration materials in the world, along with arts, crafts, photographs, and sheet music documenting a culture that once had to fight for its survival.
