Zelenska visits Paris exhibition on Ukraine’s destroyed churches

Part of the Paris exhibition featuring Odesa’s Transfiguration Cathedral. Photo: Zelenska’s Telegram channel

An exhibition devoted to the destruction and protection of Ukraine’s cultural heritage during the war has opened at an architecture museum in Paris. The exhibition was personally visited by First Lady Olena Zelenska, who wrote about it on her Telegram channel.

One of the central exhibits in the project, “Heritage That Resists: From Timbuktu to Odesa,” is the UOC’s Holy Transfiguration Cathedral in Odesa, which sustained extensive damage in a strike.

The exhibition at the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, the world’s largest architecture museum, presents destroyed churches, museums, and libraries, as well as efforts to save them.

According to the president’s wife, the project offers an unvarnished portrayal of how architectural treasures suffer during military hostilities. In a section titled “Erasure,” visitors are shown evidence of the destruction of sacred sites and cultural landmarks that Europe must see “at least in photographs.”

Another part of the exhibition, titled “Resistance,” focuses on efforts to protect valuable monuments with sandbags and evacuate museum collections. The “Restoration” section demonstrates the use of 3D scanning technologies to document damage – the first step toward the future reconstruction of the sites.

Zelenska stressed that behind every damaged building are human lives and the stories of entire generations.

As the UOJ previously reported, an exhibition about “church rashism” has been touring Ukraine.

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