Svydnyk Museum of Ukrainian Culture

Svydnyk Museum of Ukrainian Culture [Музей української культури в Свиднику; Muzei ukrainskoi kultury u Svydnyku]. A state-funded museum in Slovakia, specializing in the culture, history, and contemporary life of the Ukrainian population of the Prešov region. The museum was formerly located in Medzilaborce (1956–7), Prešov (1957–60, as part of the Prešov Regional Museum), and Krasný Brod (1960–4); in 1964 it was moved into its own building in Svydnyk. A library (24,500 vols in 1981) and manuscript, tape, photo, film, and phonorecord archives are located at the museum. The Dezyderii Myly Art Gallery was established there in 1983, and an outdoor museum of folk architecture on the grounds of the Svydnyk open-air theater was created as part of the museum in the early 1980s. One-room museums in the villages of Čertižné and Habura and the small Oleksander Dukhnovych Museum in the village of Topol’ia were branches of the museum. The museum published exhibition catalogs and 11 large volumes (1965–7, 1969–72, 1976–7, 1979–80, 1982–3) of its serial Naukovyi zbirnyk, containing valuable studies on the Prešov region by I. Chabyniak, M. Rusynko, Stepan Hostyniak, Mykola Mushynka, V. Lakata, Mykhailo Shmaida, M. Sopolyha, I. Chyzhmar, and other Ukrainian scholars in Czechoslovakia. To date 25 volumes (in 28 books) of Naukovyi zbirnyk have been published. An anniversary guide to the museum was published in 1981. The museum's directors have been O. Hrytsak, Chabyniak, M. Rusynko, and M. Sopolyha.

Roman Senkus

[This article was updated in 2014.]