Museum of History and Local Lore, Kitsman

When traveling in Bukovyna, you should definitely get acquainted with the local life and culture. There are many local lore and history museums in the region that will give you this opportunity. In particular, if you find yourself in the small district center of Kitsman, be sure to visit the local history and local lore museum.

The collection of exhibits in Kitsman includes about 2860 artifacts. They are exhibited in 4 departments, into which the museum is conditionally divided. It presents the life and culture of the Kitsman region from ancient times to the present day. It will be especially interesting for tourists to see the ethnographic collection, which tells about the clothes and household items of local residents at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Attention is drawn to the collection of embroidered shirts worn by the locals more than a hundred years ago.

A separate room is dedicated to the outstanding native of the region Volodymyr Ivasyuk. Here you can see his personal belongings, photographs, and many exhibits tell about the composer's school years. The third hall is dedicated to the events of the Second World War, with soldiers' belongings, their front-line letters, wartime journalism, and much more.

The last hall will introduce you to the literary and artistic life of the region. Here, the museum staff has assembled a collection dedicated to prominent writers who were natives of Bukovyna. The museum has also paid attention to those cultural figures who visited the region at different times: O. Kobylianska, I. Franko, Y. Fedkovych, I. Mykolaychuk, Lesia Ukrainka, and others. The museum has a separate exhibition hall where works by local craftsmen are periodically exhibited.

The Kitsman Museum of History and Local Lore was opened in late 1982, and some time later it became a branch of the Chernivtsi Museum of Local Lore. Its peculiarity is that it was opened in an architectural monument - a 19th-century post office building. The museum owes a lot to local enthusiasts who support it and continue to work on replenishing the collection.

The most interesting exhibits of the museum:

- Fragments of GRADs and other weapons brought by volunteers from the Kitsman region from the East of Ukraine.

- An ancient loom (popularly called a "krosna") of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kitsman was considered the center of carpet weaving at that time, and this craft was practiced in every home. Women wove, embroidered, and decorated clothes for all family members. This is one of the versions of the origin of the town's name, which is listed as "Kotsman" in the grant of Oleksandr Dobroi from 1413. It is assumed that the word "kots" means a carpet made of sheep's wool.

- Household items and tools of Kotsman residents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

- A grand piano from the late nineteenth century. This family heirloom was donated to the museum by the intelligent Rostotskyi family from Sukhoverkhiv.

- The personal belongings of the Hero of Ukraine, poet and composer Volodymyr Ivasyuk include a stage costume, awards, workbooks, report cards, diaries, self-portraits and portraits of his father Mykhailo Hryhorovych, and scripts written by him. There are also Volodymyr's awards, which he received in 1971 for winning the first Soviet Song of the Year contest at the Ostankino TV studio in Moscow, where Chervona Ruta, performed by young and then unknown Ivasyuk, Yaremchuk, and Zinkevych, was recognized as the song of the year.

- The dial of the clock that was installed on the Roman Catholic Church in Kitsman (the entire mechanism is no longer operational and is stored in the attic of the city council). The clock was removed after the October Revolution with the advent of the Bolsheviks, whose programmatic principles had no place for religious values.

- A gramophone from 1940, which was found in the attic of the Kitsman Technical School (now College) of the PSTAU. This rare item was given a second life, repaired, tuned, and music is now playing again.

- Watercolor paintings by artist Volodymyr Kerkevych from Feodosia (Crimea). They are proudly displayed in the museum with the hope that "Crimea will return to us, because Crimea is Ukraine."

The museum is located at 50 Nezalezhnosti Street, in the central part of the town. The M-19 highway, which connects Chernivtsi and Ternopil, passes through Kitsman. The town can be reached by bus from Chernivtsi, Ternopil, Rivne, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Zalishchyky. The city is also conveniently accessible by rail, in particular from Kyiv by the Kyiv-Chernivtsi train.

Openinghours of the Kitsman Museum of History and Local Lore: open to visitors from 9:00 to 17:00, weekends - Sunday and Monday.

Entrance fee: 10 UAH for a full ticket, 7 and 5 UAH for students and children, respectively. Group tour: 25 UAH.