The Founder of Heritage. The Story of Varvara Khanenko in the Era of the First Globalization
Hanna Rudyk
11.11.2025, 18:30
Conference Room of the Center for Urban History
We invite you to a lecture by Hanna Rudyk on the life story of Varvara Khanenko, which will be held as part of the lecture series "Let's Have a City"
Varvara Khanenko is one of those who, in the first decades of the 20th century, actively and productively participated in the process of shaping the Ukrainian national heritage. A girl from a family of Hlukhiv merchants who became the co-owner of the most valuable private collection of world art in pre-Russian Ukraine, she founded a museum at the end of her life that turned Kyiv into a cultural metropolis.
The story of Varvara Khanenko is a story about the formation of a Ukrainian person of culture in the amazing era of the first globalization. How did this formation take place? What people and environments nurtured Varvara, determined the direction of her interests, and became sources of her inner energy? We will trace the different facets of her personality and role as a collector of old art, an initiator of support for Ukrainian folk traditions and the artisanal movement, a progressive estate manager, and a patroness of education, culture, and social change in the village. She faced great moral trials during the Russian-Ukrainian War of 1917-1920. The decisions made by Varvara Khanenko, an elderly, lonely, and weak woman, turned out to be a great public good for Ukraine.
We will also talk about Varvara and the Khanenko Museum: the latest research on her history, the inertia and evolution of her public image over the past three decades, attempts to reconstruct memory without an archive, and the growing "presence of absence."
The event is organiszed by the Center for urban History in cooperation with online-journal re/visions.
Museum art historian, curator, and educator with a PhD in the history of culture (2001). Since 2002, she has curated the Islamic art collection at the Khanenko Museum in Kyiv. She has also conducted archival research on the history of the Khanenko family and their collection of non-European heritage. In 2013, she curated The Sense of Her Life, the first exhibition dedicated to Varvara Khanenko. Since 2024, Rudyk has been focusing on the decolonial revision of its narratives and the redesigning of its educational strategies to support visitors affected by the Russian war of aggression. Her key professional interests include museology of non-European heritage, museum decolonial turn, and trauma-sensitive communication.
Hanna Rudyk
Credits
Gallery: Iryna Sereda