The Louvre Museum in Paris will exhibit five rare icons taken from Kiev, to protect them from war.
The icons, on display since Wednesday, come from a group of 16 extremely fragile works from the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko Museum, which were secretly removed in May for protection by the Paris museum.
The items traveled to France via Poland and Germany in a special convoy.
Icons are stylized painted portraits, usually of saints, considered sacred in Eastern Orthodox churches.
Four of the icons are encaustic paintings on wood from St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt’s Sinai Desert and date to the 6th and early 7th centuries.
The fifth is a micromosaic icon depicting Saint Nicholas made between the end of the 13th and the beginning of the 14th century in Constantinople, with a gold frame.
The other 11 works are kept in the Louvre.
“It is a very symbolic and effective gesture of support for Ukrainian culture,” Oleksander Tkachenko, Ukraine’s culture minister, told reporters at the Louvre.
“(The Russians) are stealing our artifacts, they have ruined our cultural heritage and it shows how great Ukrainian culture is, which is part of the world heritage,” he added.
At the beginning 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 in a rocket attack 40 meters from its walls.
The Louvre exhibition, entitled “The Origins of the Sacred Image: Icons of the National Museum of Arts by Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko of Kiev”, will continue until 6 November.
((Editorial Translation São Paulo)) REUTERS BC AC
Source: Terra
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