Ochakiv may evict Sudkovskyi Museum from municipal building

The Rufin Sudkovskyi Museum in Ochakiv. Photo from the discover website

A branch of the Mykolaiv Regional Art Museum named after Rufin Sudkovskyi is under threat in Ochakiv — local authorities want to evict the institution from a communal building.

This became known during a meeting of the specialised commission of the Mykolaiv Regional Council, according to NikVesti.

The museum in Ochakiv was opened in 1982 on the basis of the Vasyl Vereshchahin Regional Art Museum.

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«The Ochakiv city executive committee is persistently trying to remove the museum in order to take away the building. Half of the premises are occupied by the museum, and the other half by a children's art school, which is in demand», said Yevhen Horburov, chairman of the commission.

Olena Buberenko, head of the Department of Culture, Nationalities and Religions of the Mykolaiv Regional State Administration, explained that the museum branch rents the premises, which belongs to the communal property of the Ochakiv City Council.

«Since the beginning of 2022, all the exhibits have been removed. So now they are not there, but the expensive equipment remains. The other part of the building is used by the Ochakiv Art School, one of the two remaining in the region,» she said.

According to Olena Buberenko, on 18 September 2025, the regional art museum received a letter from the Department of Education and Humanitarian Affairs of the Ochakiv City Council. In the document, the museum was accused of «negligent care of the premises» and offered to terminate the lease agreement early.

«However, I have an act of 2023. After the effects of the enemy shelling, a commission chaired by Deputy Mayor Oleksii Vaskov declared the building unfit for use», Buberenko said.

According to her, the Ochakiv city authorities verbally warned the museum's management that the lease would not be extended after 1 January 2026.

Olena Buberenko added that the museum plans to resume work after the end of hostilities and return the exhibition.

Denys Andrieiev, deputy chairman of the regional council, said that the main thing now is not to give grounds for terminating the contract with the museum.

«It is necessary to eliminate the grounds for refusing to extend the contract. It is necessary to provide a qualified answer to the city council, show that measures have been taken to preserve the property, and apply for the lease extension in time,» said Andrieiev.

The commission decided to recommend that the Department of Culture, Nationalities and Religions send an official letter to the mayor of Ochakiv and take the issue of extending the lease agreement under control.

Reference. Ochakiv is the birthplace of the famous 19th-century marine painter Rufin Sudkovskyi. In 1982, the first museum of marine painting in Ukraine, a branch of the Vereshchahin Mykolaiv Regional Art Museum, was opened here. The museum building is pre-revolutionary and was once used as a barracks and a polyclinic. The collection includes over 600 works of art.

The exhibition consists of three halls. The first one is dedicated to the life and work of Rufin Sudkovskyi, in particular his works with landscapes of Mykolaiv region. The second one is dedicated to marine painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including originals by Ivan Aivazovskyi, and the third one is dedicated to works by 20th-century artists.

As a reminder, 329 paintings of the twentieth century from the collections of two local museums in Mykolaiv — the Vasyl Vereshchahin Art Museum and the Regional Museum of Local Lore — are now available in a virtual gallery and a bilingual printed catalogue. This became possible thanks to the cultural project «Digital Museum Collection», which has been running for 5 years.

Earlier, NikVesti wrote that as of 7 September, the Mykolaiv Regional Museum of Local Lore and the Vasyl Vereshchahin Art Museum had digitised almost 700 exhibits.

From the first days of the full-scale war, Mykolaiv museums had to save exhibits from shelling and the risk of occupation. The collections of the three largest institutions, the Vasyl Vereshchahin Art Museum, the Regional Museum of Local Lore, and the Museum of Shipbuilding and Fleet, were evacuated to safe places. Read more about how it happened in the article NikVesti «Evacuation of exhibits and shelling: survival of Mykolaiv museums during the war»