Ukraine Incognita website turns five!

The Internet project Ukraine Incognita has been studying and reconsidering Ukrainian history using electronic means for five years already. Let us recall that it got its name from the eponymous first volume in Den’s Library series. To mark the 15th anniversary of this newspaper, we decided to free our large historical portfolio from the limits imposed by print media and put it online. These days, the Ukraine Incognita website offers a unique array of national and local history contributions which were published in the newspaper and Ukraine Incognita volumes of our Library series over these two decades.

By now, the resource contains not only already traditional newspaper sections “History and I,” “The Route No. 1” and “The Family Album of Ukraine,” but also, for the first time in the Ukrainian Internet space, offers an unprecedented virtual collection of the best Ukrainian museums, called “Museums Online.” The interactive Intellectual Map of Ukraine, created with active involvement of our readers, reconstructs the past of different localities of Ukraine, ranging from entire cities to certain iconic streets. The website has its regular bloggers who reveal unfamiliar historical episodes or offer non-trivial interpretations of known facts. Having been posted on Ukraine Incognita or Den’s website, which is offered in Ukrainian, Russian, and English, these articles reach their grateful readers and the audience is steadily growing.

Den’s editor-in-chief Larysa Ivshyna stressed: “My careful analysis of the processes that took place and are still taking place in the post-Soviet space convinces me that the ongoing struggle is not just about resources, like oil and gas, but above all, about nations’ places in history.”

“Den has always paid a lot of attention to history and historical memory, and I say it as a long-standing reader. Some media start history-themed sections just to amuse their audience. However, Den is different: its interest in history is of a strategic nature,” Doctor of Science in Philology, Professor, and Den’s contributor Volodymyr Panchenko said in a comment. “‘Kinless Ivans’ [an expression denoting people without roots or identity. – Ed.] cannot win. Memory loss is a synonym of spiritual slavery, derivative nature of one’s identity, which in our case manifests itself as the Little Russian identity... The logic of this issue is that simple.

“Therefore, I applaud Den’s projects, including the Ukraine Incognita website. I go further as well, since I try to help their implementation by contributing to them. We Ukrainians have a lot of work to do on our self-identity and need to remember our genealogy and be aware that we are the heirs of Kyivan Rus’, the Cossack State, and the Ukrainian People’s Republic... Muscovy annexed our history back in the time of Peter the Great on purpose. It is still fighting with us to regain Kyiv as a symbol... All this must be understood. We ought to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Ukrainian independence as the date of restoration of the state rather than the anniversary of the independence proclamation. Our slogan could be ‘From Kyivan Rus’ to European Ukraine!’ It is wonderful that the audience of your history-themed website is expanding. This means that we are gradually learning to be ourselves.”

“I like every feature of the Ukraine Incognita website: a convenient search engine, an intellectual calendar, its well-thought-out policy of disseminating historical knowledge, and especially the ‘Museums Online’ section,” Doctor of Science in History, professor, deputy director for research at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine’s Institute of Ukrainian History, and Den’s contributor Stanislav Kulchytsky noted in a comment. “Everyone can visit this website and have a virtual ‘tour’ of museum halls, be it the Hutsul Land and Pokuttia Folk Art Museum or the Stepan Bandera Museum in London. It is an extremely important educational component and we need to make sure that schoolteachers as well as college faculty members and ordinary curious and responsible citizens are aware of it. In this way, we will learn our history!”