Did you know that:

In 1934, an exhibition of mummified samples opened for the visitors of the “All-Ukrainian Museum Town” State Historical and Cultural Preserve. It operated then on the territory of the Kyiv-Pechersk Monastery? The exhibition was located in the interior of the Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in the Near Caves. One could see there “the samples of artificial and natural mummification that belonged to both, humans and animals”. Due to the policy of the totalitarian Bolshevik government, which demanded that museums conducted aggressive anti-religious propaganda, museum workers of the so-called “Division of Natural and Artificial Mummification” were forced to tell the tourists about “the corpses that did not decompose” as well as human remains and animal сarcasses that “were fabricated”. On the list of these “fabricated relics” one could find the remains of the Venerable Grygoriy the Icon Painter, St Eustratius the Faster and John the Long Suffering; the photographs of mummified bodies of the members of the Lyzogub Cossack family; the carcasses of the animals (like crocodile, bat, or calf) etc.

Captions to illustrations:

1. Exhibition of mummified samples in the interior of the Church of the Exaltation of the Cross in the Near Caves [KPL-N-2887]

2. Fragment of the exhibition of mummified samples in the interior of the Church of the Exaltation of the Cross in the Near Caves [KPL-N-2890]