The Vereshchahin Museum in Mykolaiv received a triptych «Cossack Atlantis» dedicated to the Kakhovka Dam tragedy

On Wednesday, 17 December, the Vasyl Vereshchahin Mykolaiv Regional Art Museum received a triptych «Cossack Atlantis» from a series of paintings by Olha Artym, winner of the Andrii Antoniuk All-Ukrainian Art Prize.

The event was attended by a correspondent of NikVesti.

The work «Cossack Atlantis» consists of three parts — «Pain», «Awakening» and «Rage». As the author notes, these works are a manifestation of the feelings she had after the news of the dam at the Kakhovka Dam being blown up by Russian troops in 2023.

Soon, Velykyi Luh, a unique territory that was flooded during the Soviet construction of the lowest power plant downstream of the Dnipro River, the so-called Dnipro Cascade, emerged from the water column of the Kakhovka Reservoir. Thus, about 400 square kilometres of islands and shores disappeared under the Dnipro water, burying villages, farms, churches, and cemeteries that were the cradle of the Zaporizhzhia Cossacks in the second half of the fifteenth century.

The artist worked on the triptych for a year. Subsequently, this work won in one of the nominations — «Painting» — of the All-Ukrainian Art Prize named after Andrii Antoniuk in the field of fine arts in 2025.

Vitalii Boichenko, Deputy Head of the Department of Culture, Nationalities and Religions of the Mykolaiv Regional Military Administration, noted that this year 17 artists from different parts of Ukraine and Europe took part in the competition. Among them are artists from Mykolaiv, Pervomaisk, Pivdennoukrainsk, Cherkasy, Odesa, Poltava, Chernivtsi, Kryvyi Rih, and Regensburg (Germany).

In turn, the chairman of the board of the Mykolaiv regional organisation of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine, Dmytro Artym, stressed that one of the main conditions of the competition was the voluntary transfer of the winners' works for permanent storage to the Vasyl Vereshchahin Mykolaiv Regional Art Museum. It should be noted that for Olha Artym, this «Cossack Atlantis» became the fourth work immortalised in the walls of the regional art museum.

One of the visitors, Nataliia Komarnytska, is a former social worker. She noted that she has been cooperating with the museum for a long time. According to the woman, the main purpose of her visit to the presentation was to film the event in order to share a piece of cultural life with her wards, who, unfortunately, cannot physically visit museums anymore, but miss them very much.

«I love our artists' union and Olha Artym. She usually paints women's portraits, flowers, such colourful themes. And this is a more heartfelt work. I really wanted to see how she did it, what she put into it. I'm very happy to have sat next to her, to have heard her voice, to have heard her tell me what was difficult for her. I'm very happy that she won and received the award,» Nataliia said.

She is also convinced that beauty will save the world, and art will help to overcome the difficult conditions in which every resident of Mykolaiv is living today because of the war.

As reported earlier, NikVesti wrote that members of the Mykolaiv City Council plan to appeal to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine and the Cabinet of Ministers with a demand to increase the salaries of cultural workers.