By Elizabeth Pineau and Antony Paone
PARIS (Reuters) – The Louvre Museum in Paris will exhibit five rare icons evacuated from the Ukrainian capital Kyiv to protect them from the war.
The icons, on display from Wednesday, are from a group of 16 extremely fragile works from Kyiv’s Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko Museum that were secretly evacuated in May to be safeguarded by the Paris museum.
They travelled to France via Poland and Germany in a special convoy.
Icons are stylized painted portraits, usually of saints, that are considered sacred in Eastern Orthodox churches.
Four of the icons – encaustic paintings on wood from Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt’s Sinai desert – date from the 6th and early 7th centuries.
The fifth is a micro-mosaic icon representing Saint Nicholas from late 13th or early 14th century Constantinople, with a gold frame.
The 11 other works are being kept in the reserves of the Louvre.
“It’s a very symbolic and effective gesture of support for Ukrainian culture,” Oleksander Tkachenko, Ukrainian culture minister, told reporters at the Louvre.
“[The Russians] are stealing our artefacts, they ruined our cultural heritage sites and this shows how big and huge Ukrainian culture is, which is part of world heritage,” he added.
He also said he was concerned by damage caused to works of art by the recent destruction of the Kakhovka dam.
He said hundreds of thousands of works of art have been sheltered since the beginning of the war.
At the start of the Russian invasion, the collections of the Khanenko Museum were hidden and the historic building is currently empty.
In October 2022, the museum and its interiors were damaged by a missile strike 40 metres from its walls.
The Louvre exhibition, titled “The Origins of the Sacred Image: Icons from the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Arts in Kyiv”, will continue until Nov. 6.
Moscow launched what it calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine on Feb. 24 to destroy its neighbour’s military capabilities and remove what it says are dangerous nationalists in Kyiv. It denies targeting civilians.
(Reporting by Elizabeth Pineau and Antony Paone; Writing by Dominique Vidalon, Editing by Alexandra Hudson)
