With 5,000 public and private institutions that contain millions of historical objects, Ukraine’s museums preserve the story of the nation’s struggle for freedom. Many museums have experienced destruction due to the ongoing war. Now, thanks to virtual tours, visitors can discover attractions such as the Zaporizhian Cossack Museum on Khortytsia Island, a pantheon of historic wooden churches, a palatial building dedicated to Ukraine’s national poet, the Hetman’s Museum, and the National History Museum of Ukraine that house art, antiquities, folk culture, and artifacts symbolizing centuries of Ukraine’s existence and resistance.
1. National Museum of History of Ukraine
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 brought broader global awareness of Ukrainian history, identity, and culture. Today, the war between Russia and Ukraine has drawn political, cultural, and geographical borders that put Ukraine’s museums under attack.
Historical artifacts preserved in museums act as visual evidence of a country’s existence. Thirty years after Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union, the country is engaged in a war to defend its national identity and geographical integrity.
In March 2024, UNESCO’s plan to rebuild Ukraine’s culture identified 349 known cultural sites damaged or destroyed since the start of the war. Reporters in Ukraine estimate this number is much higher, with over 1,600 historic buildings, churches, cathedrals, museums, and other local history sites damaged or destroyed as of July 2023.
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Fortunately, visitors who cannot catch a direct flight to Ukraine right now can still explore major museums, such as the National Museum of History of Ukraine, via a virtual portal that offers insight into Ukraine’s historical progress toward statehood.
Opened by Tsar Nicholas II in 1904, the museum, then known as the Kyiv Art, Industry, and Science Museum, flourished during the First World War. In 1919, the Soviets seized the museum as state property and renamed it the First State Museum. Throughout its turbulent history, the museum remained dedicated to housing items that tell the story of Ukraine.
The museum houses 800,000 items in total, with over 22,000 on permanent display. These items range from manuscripts and archeological relics such as ancient coins and weapons collections to paintings, decorative arts, folk culture, and artifacts from the twentieth-century Ukrainian War of Independence (1917-1921).
The museum offers fascinating sections in Ukrainian and English on ancient history, World War I and World War II, and more recent objects from Ukraine’s independence in 1991.
Visitors can use a panoramic tour to explore three floors of Ukrainian history from the Neolithic period through the twentieth century. Browse rich digital collections that include mammoth teeth, Paleolithic jewelry, gold hoards, bronze artifacts, antique weapons, a rare disc calendar from the middle Dnipro culture, terracotta statues depicting ancient Greek and Slavic deities, coins, seals, and pottery retrieved from archeological digs, religious icons, and historical maps.
Enjoy virtual views of stunning Scythian gold treasures or appreciate simple representations of ancient folk culture, such as a fourth-century decorative glass goblet painted with the timeless colors of Ukraine—fertile black earth, golden fields, and blue skies overhead.
The museum’s website is especially beneficial if you understand some Ukrainian, but you can still learn a lot about Ukrainian history even if you do not speak the language.
2. National Museums of Folk Architecture and Life of Ukraine
Don’t miss these virtual tours of seven authentic open-air museums that offer a time-traveling experience if you are a history lover who wants to know more about Ukraine’s rich history and culture. Whether you are interested in the Cossack period, appreciate unique historical sites, or enjoy gorgeous foreign scenery, these museums have something to offer for everyone.
Available in English, these immersive virtual tours allow visitors to step into several different folk museums, including the Mamaeva Sloboda Museum, the house of Bohdan Khmelnitsky—the hetman who led a successful uprising against Polish power in 1648—and the famous Zaporizhian Sich located on Khortytsia Island.
The Zaporizhian Sich is a collective replica of the eight Zaporizhian Siches, or fortified Cossack settlements, that had existed from the sixteenth century until the eighteenth century. The Zaporizhian Cossacks were Ukrainian warriors who prized freedom and sought independence at different times from both Moscow and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Sich on Khortytsia Island remained a defensive fortress and community space for two hundred years.
After a final uprising in 1775, Catherine II deported the Zaporizhian Cossacks to the Kuban region in the North Caucasus. While they later became known as Kuban Cossacks, they retained their ethnic and historical ties to Ukraine.
An online tour lets visitors enter the national reserve on Khortytsia Island, where exhibitions tell the story of the Zaporizhian Cossacks’ way of life and spiritual culture. Inside the fort, surrounded by a moat, sharpened stake fence, and defense towers, you can explore the Cossack garrison area, a church, the hetman’s house, the artisan suburb, Cossack huts, a pottery workshop, a forge, a tavern, a school, and a house where hetmans received special envoys. The museum offers visitors a holistic view of the early Cossacks and their centrality to Ukrainian history.
The Mamaeva Sloboda Museum is another historical site that visitors can access online. Located on 22 acres, the museum houses 98 exhibits that replicate historical Ukrainian settlements and lifestyles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
While in-person visitors can experience a horse or carriage ride, participate in craft classes, fire a salute from a cannon, or sample traditional dishes at the museum’s wooden restaurant, virtual visitors can enjoy many other aspects of the tour. Step through the main Tsarina gate to wander through the unique, domed wooden church, explore a local pottery, a blacksmith’s workshop, a Cossack armor-bearer’s site, and even stop at a fortune teller’s place.
Pyrohovo is another of Ukraine’s open-air folk life and architecture sites. Located near Kyiv, the nearby village of Pyrohiv dates to the seventeenth century. At the same time, archeological digs reveal a settlement that has existed there for generations since the Bronze Age.
This gorgeous ethnographic museum houses exhibits outdoors rather than inside buildings, where they would have stood historically. Just use the virtual tour to navigate over 300 pieces of historic folk architecture sourced from cultures all over Ukraine and reassembled on the 370-acre complex. Highlights include an iconic wooden church, windmills, and thatched cottages (khati) dating back to the sixteenth century.
Use online navigation and peaceful audio to stroll through the quiet village and soak in the atmosphere of centuries-old houses and a stunning wooden church. These structures, crafted in warm colors and natural materials, give these historical spaces a welcoming and lived-in feel.
3. Taras Shevchenko National Museum
A former serf turned poet, artist, and activist, Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) helped spearhead the modern Ukrainian nationalism movement during the nineteenth century. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the Russian Empire annexed most of Ukraine under Catherine the Great, sparking unrest and resistance. Early in life, Shevchenko showed a brilliant aptitude for art. After buying his freedom at age 24, Shevchenko joined the Ukrainian independence organization Society of Cyril and Methodius, named after the Byzantine “Apostles to the Slavs” who invented the Glagolitic script, the ancestor of the Cyrillic alphabet.
During these fruitful years, Shevchenko wrote 237 poems, ballads, elegies, lyrical verses, satires, novellas, a journal, and an autobiography. Shevchenko’s work criticized serfdom and fought back against the repression of Ukrainian language, history, and culture. His dramatic poems inspired Ukrainians to embrace and protect their ethnic heritage.
In 1847, Shevchenko’s revolutionary poetry and association with Ukrainian society led to his arrest and ten-year exile in the Russian military. Tsar Nicholas I, who understood the power of the pen, banned the poet from writing or painting. Shevchenko managed to survive and retain his creative spirit during a brutal exile in remote penal settlements.
Released in the Spring of 1858 in a weakened state, Shevchenko tried to return home to his beloved Ukraine that summer. Instead, he was arrested and shipped back to St. Petersburg. He died in 1861 at age 47, just before Tsar Alexander II emancipated the serfs. The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky and other famous literary members of the Petrashevsky Circle attended his funeral.
Now, visitors can explore Taras Shevchenko’s significant contributions to Ukrainian art, identity, and nationhood via a virtual tour at the National Museum dedicated to his life and work. Located in central Kyiv, the museum is a must-see for literary lovers or those interested in Ukrainian history.
Enter the art gallery on the main floor to view over 4,000 original oil paintings, etchings, pencil drawings, watercolors, and important archival documents such as Shevchenko’s autograph, copies of manuscripts, original editions of his works, and rare photographs exhibited in 24 halls and rooms. Each room offers a summary in English.
Shevchenko’s work revived earlier Cossack ideas about freedom and represented Ukraine as a distinct ethnic nation separate from Russia. Shevchenko’s poems, such as Kobzar, expressed Ukrainians’ desire for self-determination and independence. Today, Shevchenko remains a symbol of Ukrainian freedom, pride, and resistance as the country’s national poet.
4. Historic Wooden Churches in the Carpathian Region
If you’re a world art and history lover who cannot currently visit Ukraine, you can still take a virtual tour to discover these significant UNESCO World Heritage sites.
Step into the solitude of these preserved and restored churches to immerse yourself in over 1,000 years of Orthodox Christian history in Ukraine. These churches, which became UNESCO World Heritage sites in 2018, represent a culmination of art, faith, and folk culture that lives on centuries later. They not only retain their historical furnishings, but they embody a significant part of Ukraine’s spiritual and cultural past.
These authentic churches (tserkvas) feature a horizontal wooden structure covered with shingles and centered on a three-part plan with octagonal or pyramidal onion domes. Each one was built during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries by craftspeople from the Orthodox and Greek Catholic faiths. They represent local material culture and symbolize the origins of the spiritual spaces of the Hutsul, Halych, Boyko, and Lemko communities.
The Church of the Ascension in Yasinya showcases the lasting handiwork of the Hutsul culture. An indigenous Eastern Slavic ethnic group that led a semi-nomadic lifestyle in the Carpathians after the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century, the Hutsuls became known for their colorful textiles, intricate woodworking skills, and shepherding way of life.
The Church of the Intercession, built in 1761, is another example of Hutsul Highlander architecture that has withstood the forces of nature and time. It occupies a natural place among forested slopes and scattered rural villages. Isolated in the Carpathian Mountains, these communities developed separately from the rest of the country, and these churches showcase their unique local style. Repaired by traditional methods over the years, these buildings are historically intact, right down to the original carpenters’ inscriptions on the door posts.
Another outstanding example of material culture is the Church of the Descent of the Holy Spirit, which seems to grow out of the natural landscape surrounding it. It features stunning wooden onion domes topped by Orthodox crosses. Carved wooden floors stretch under a blaze of lamplight and natural light, hand-embroidered altarpieces, and a glittering iconostasis depicting images of apostles and saints that date back to the church’s construction.
Thirteen of the sixteen historic wooden churches existing in the Carpathians remain places of worship, while the remaining three at Rohatyn, Radruż, and Drohobyh feature as museums.
5. The Hetmans Museum
This small museum is a powerful but often overlooked attraction in Kyiv. The Hetmans Museum houses important historical relics from the rise of Ukrainian Cossack statehood during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and artifacts from the twentieth-century fight for Ukrainian independence from the Soviets.
The white, colonnaded building, offset with terracotta-colored accents, dates to the time of Ivan Mazepa, a famous Ukrainian Cossack political and military figure. In a historical twist, Mazepa turned against Moscow and joined the Swedish forces in the Second Northern War that lasted from 1701 to 1721 during the reign of Peter the Great.
The Museum of the Hetmans presents important signposts from Ukrainian history, from the development of the Cossack State, known as the Hetmanate, to the turbulent times of the Ukrainian Revolution at the end of the First World War.
Click on the museum portal to enter the world of the Ukrainian Cossacks and their twentieth-century descendants.
Here, you can explore over 8,000 exhibits that cover the war of liberation launched by Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, Ivan Mazepa’s state-building actions, and the creation of the Cossack state. The museum includes many materials related to Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi, who became the Hetman of Ukraine in 1918. Virtual visitors can also view multiple works of art, such as paintings, sculptures, declassified archival materials about Hetman Skoropadskyi’s administration from the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine, and a library that houses over 3,000 books. English speakers will appreciate the museum’s effort to offer English translations.
Don’t miss the famous portraits of the first Cossack hetman, Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, and the last hetman, Pavlo Skoropadskyi, engravings of Ivan Mazapa, Cossack regalia, seals, or the famous bulava (ceremonial mace) that dates back to the thirteenth century.
Together, these five Ukrainian museums offer a crucial window into the country’s complex and significant history. They stand as symbols of Ukraine’s ethnic identity, their struggle for independence, and their determination to prevent their nationhood from being erased.
