The story
Since 2022 the best pictures of the Kharkiv Art Museum have been somewhere else. In the first weeks of Russia's full-scale invasion the most valuable works were packed and sent to other regions of Ukraine. In March 2022 missile strikes on the city centre blew out the windows and stained glass of both museum buildings.
What left was the heart of the collection. The museum holds Ukraine's largest group of paintings by Ilya Repin, the realist painter born in nearby Chuhuiv. Among them is his second version of the Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, the scene of Cossacks roaring with laughter as they compose an insulting letter to the Ottoman sultan. Repin worked on it from 1889 to 1893, and it came to Kharkiv from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow in 1932. Another landmark is Victim of Fanaticism, painted in 1899 by the Kyiv artist Mykola Pymonenko, in which a small-town crowd turns on a young woman.
The museum's historic home is a mansion built in 1912 for an industrialist by the architect Oleksiy Beketov. On 14 June 2026 a Russian drone hit it. The roof burned out, ceilings above the second floor fell in, and nearly 1,000 graphic works still kept in the building were damaged, many by the water used to put out the fire.
