Seven sacred treasures from Kyiv go on show at London's V&A
Seven gilded treasures from a Kyiv monastery are now on show in London for the first time.
The free display, Sacred Treasures from Kyiv, opened on 14 September at the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington, London. It runs until 17 September 2027 in Galleries 84 and 89, according to the museum and reporting by The Art Newspaper.
The seven works date to the 18th century. They are drawn from the National Preserve Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, the monastic and museum complex in Kyiv, and are described by the Ukrainian Institute as Baroque treasures from Ukraine.
Entry is free. No ticket is needed.
Two pieces anchor the group. One is a Ukrainian Orthodox icon from 1700, made from a single sheet of gilded copper. The other is a gospel book from 1707, fitted with a decorative cover encrusted with medallions.
The display also includes a tabernacle — a small, ornate container used to hold sacred objects — from the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, listed in the V&A’s online collection. The V&A describes the group as Ukrainian sacred art that reflects Kyiv’s Orthodox Christian heritage, as noted in its collection records (V&A collection).
The backstory starts with another set of doors. Two pairs of silver-gilt gates from the Pechersk Lavra monastery, now part of the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert collection on long-term loan to the V&A, prompted the joint British-Ukrainian project behind the display.
Those gates carry a long paper trail. Provenance, the documented chain of ownership, shows they were commissioned by Russian empress Catherine the Great in 1784 and made by craftsman Oleksii Ishchenko. The Soviets removed them in the 1930s for sale abroad.
In 1935 they were sold by Goldschmidt Galleries to the American newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. The Los Angeles collectors Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert acquired them in the 1970s.
The V&A says the gates were previously misattributed as Russian rather than Ukrainian. The Holy Gates by Ishchenko are now on view in the museum’s Gilbert Galleries. A second pair of altar gates in the collection — the doors that stand at the entrance to the sanctuary in an Orthodox church — is credited to maker Hryhorii Chyzhevskyi and was shown as part of a special display tracing that history (V&A collection).
The display was linked to a symposium, Ukrainian Cultural Heritage and UK Institutions: Shifting Perspectives and Practice, held at the V&A on 15 September. Maksym Ostapenko, general director of the National Preserve Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, is involved in the partnership.
What makes this stand out for visitors is the closeness. Seven small, glittering things in two galleries, each with a maker’s name and a monastery address. You do not need church history to follow them. Turn them over in your mind, as the labels invite you to do, and the labels tell you where they have been.
