Was it worth it?

The historical and architectural reserve “Chernihiv Ancient” reported on the attendance of the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral, which was taken away from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and turned into a museum. Since June 28, the temple as a museum was visited by 1000 people, 200 of whom are representatives of the privileged category and another 50 tickets were issued on a non-paid basis. In the “reserve” also told about how much tickets cost to enter the temple. 50 hryvnia – standard, 20 hryvnia – preferential (children, pensioners, etc.). Thus, by simple mathematical calculations, it turns out that the “reserve” for almost a month and a half earned 41500 hryvnias.

Now we subtract the costs of the “reserve”, which someone has to cover. This is at least three employees with salaries plus or minus 10 thousand hryvnias without taking into account taxes, electricity, which is spent on lighting the temple and other organizational costs. As a result, we can assume that after the first month of operation of the cathedral taken away from the UOC, the Spaso-Preobrazhensky temple-museum turned out to be a loss-making enterprise, which – due to the fact that the “reserve” is a state organization – has put an additional burden on the city budget. This, in turn, means that somewhere in Chernihiv one entrance in some high-rise building was not cleaned, the fee in public transportation was raised by 1-2 hryvnias and so on. All because the “Spaso-Preobrazhensky Museum” is an unprofitable and inherently flawed idea of the local Department of Culture represented by the reserve “Chernihiv Ancient”.

At the same time, it is worth recalling that at the time when the Cathedral was in the ownership of the Chernihiv diocese of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the entrance to it was free of charge, and the repayment of utilities and other expenses was the responsibility of the religious organization that used the temple for its intended purpose. Thus, a legitimate question hangs in the air – was it worth it? Was it not possible to simply force the religious community to eliminate the defects that the commission of the Ministry of Culture allegedly revealed during the inspection? What did the “reserve” in the Cathedral of the Transfiguration of the Savior show after the “restoration” that the residents of Chernihiv could not see when the church was owned by the UOC?

The saddest thing is that Chernihiv is only one not the biggest example of how the state, just to spite the Church, undertakes to maintain such “suitcases without a handle”, which, from the museum point of view, in fact, have no significant value. Imagine how much budget funds are spent on the maintenance of Kiev-Pechersk Lavra! And how much more will be spent if the authorities want to take away Pochaevskaya and Svyatogorskaya Lavras! And in fact the Church maintained these premises almost entirely at its own expense. The Church spent colossal funds for the preservation of these architectural monuments. The Church developed the places that the state had turned into deserted deserts.

Speaking of all this, we should also take into account the fact that Ukraine is now getting poorer rather than richer. It is not excluded that in a few years after such unprofitable initiatives, someone in the Ministry of Finance will calculate the costs of the “exuberant” activities of the Ministry of Culture in this area and, in the end, these objects will be simply “mothballed” and abandoned. And what will be the result? They froze their grandmother’s ears off…