On 30 July 2026, our museum staff visited Poltava and met with Ivan Novobranets, an 87-year-old Honoured Artist of Ukraine, lyre player and kobzar.
The artist was born in the village of Berezotocha in the Lubny district. It was here that his family experienced the Holodomor, which resulted in the loss of one of their sons, seven-year-old Ivan. His parents later named their youngest son, born in 1939, after him. In 1946–1947, the younger Ivan also suffered from famine. His childhood and youth, the artist recalls, were hard and hopeless: hunger, cold and poverty plagued their peasant home for years. ‘I didn’t get my fill of bread until Khrushchev’s time,’ says the artist.
Later, these painful pages of his family’s history became the subjects of his paintings on the Holodomor. Those works are now part of our museum’s collection.
Our colleagues recorded an in-depth interview with the artist and obtained valuable items for the museum’s permanent collection.
