Religious minorities archives and the war in Ukraine: The Adventist Historical Archive-Museum in Bucha

Aims and objectives

The Bucha Adventist Historical Archive-Museum is the richest collection in Ukraine, and possibly in the world, of religious ephemera dating from the 17th to 20th century: samizdat, photographs, manuscripts, folk art, religious maps from Crimea (nowadays occupied by Russia). The collection contains unique and rare documents that shed light on lesser-known popular religious culture in Ukraine from the Imperial to the Soviet period. The archive was created a long time ago in Crimea and after the region's occupation in 2014 it was transferred to Bucha, where it was partly damaged (with digitised copies fully destroyed) during the occupation and massacre in February 2022. 

Preserving Archives at Risk

This archive has survived displacement, occupation, and destruction – more than once.

In 2014, as Crimea was occupied by Russia, members of the community secretly smuggled their archive out of the peninsula to save it from seizure. The materials found refuge in Bucha, near Kyiv, where they were housed at the Ukrainian Institute of Arts and Sciences and the Ukrainian Division of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.

It was endangered once again when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Bucha was temporarily occupied in February–March. Russian soldiers broke into the building where the archive was kept and lived on the premises. For weeks, we had no way of knowing what had happened to the archive, or whether it had been completely destroyed. When access was finally restored, the devastation was overwhelming: windows and doors were broken, some items were stolen, computers and laptops were smashed, and every single memory stick was lost. Eight years of digitization work vanished overnight – no backup survived.

Today, the archive remains at risk. Ongoing war damage, power shortages, and unsuitable storage conditions continue to threaten the physical materials.

With the support of the British Library and Research Ireland, the HIDE team established an on-site digitization unit in Ukraine. The team received training in digitization workflows, image quality control, metadata creation, file management, backup procedures, and archival preservation. During the pilot phase, we created 60,000 high-quality digital copies, ensuring that even if the originals are endangered, their historical memory is not lost.

This project is about more than digitization. It is about protecting fragile histories in the face of war – and refusing to let them disappear.

Learn more about the archive and its story:

• When does the “Soviet” end? Archival activism and collaborative anthropology in wartime
  Ukraine.
• Faith and war: Grassroots Ukrainian Protestantism in the context of the Russian invasion