The sculpture The Bitter Memory of Childhood is once again dressed in an embroidered shirt

Today, to mark International Vyshyvanka Day, our sculpture ‘Bitter Memory of Childhood’ has once again been ‘dressed’ in an embroidered shirt.

The festive attire worn by our ‘girl with ears of grain’ on this day serves as a symbolic reminder that, despite the Holodomor genocide, repression, Russification and the destruction of national culture, Ukrainians have preserved themselves, their identity and Ukraine.

The shirt for the sculpture was created by Liudmyla Tyshkova, a craftswoman from Volyn. Its prototype was a shirt decorated with lilies from photographs in a unique collection of glass plate negatives from our museum’s archives. The photographs were taken by an unknown photographer in the Romny region in the 1930s, with some dated 1933. During an expedition in 2020, our staff discovered these glass negatives, which were later donated to the museum by the charitable organisation ‘Rozvytok Posullia’.

We launched the tradition of dressing our ‘girl with ears of grain’ in an embroidered shirt for Vyshyvanka Day in May 2023. At that time, our campaign was dedicated to the children whose childhoods were stolen by the Holodomor perpetrated by the Stalinist regime. And now a new regime, Putin’s, continues to steal the childhoods of Ukrainian children. Today, as we remind the world of the genocide that Ukraine endured over 90 years ago, we emphasise: evil has returned and continues to commit crimes against us and our identity. Take care of yourselves, your family heirlooms, your language and culture. And do not lose your historical memory. We will persevere!