Ukraine Incognita
The NGO Ukraine Incognita was founded in 2016. Its main goal is to monitor, register, and save the cultural heritage of Ukraine. The organization's website is an independent online media platform that focuses on the cultural heritage of Ukraine. At the same time, it is one of the most information-rich regional websites in Ukraine. Thousands of users visit the site daily to read information about Ukraine.
During the full-scale invasion, one of the main projects of the NGO is “Ancient Cemeteries of Ukraine,” which aims to create a separate registry of historical necropolises, a map, and a dedicated website. Ukraine Incognita is the only organization in Ukraine (not just among NGOs) that is conducting large-scale registration of ancient Ukrainian necropolises, including their search, including expeditions, data entry into the database, and localization on the map. The NGO’s list already contains more than 870 necropolises. The NGO also organizes clean-up and maintenance events (5 clean-up campaigns over the last 1.5 years) directly with communities, gathering documents and creating inventory cards for these necropolises.
With the support of the Department of Cultural Heritage Protection of the Kyiv City State Administration, the NGO is implementing a project to create digital copies of cultural heritage objects in Kyiv in case they are damaged, for further research and restoration work. Among the digital copies created by the NGO is the Church of the Savior at Berestov, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
In March 2024, the NGO completed the project "Cultural Dimension of the Community – the Village of Moshny," which was implemented as part of a grant from the "Isolation" foundation. The project involved working with the Moshny community: seminars, practical sessions, and presentations related to the cultural dimension of the community and its cultural heritage. Three-dimensional digital copies of 8 buildings were created, 8 stands were installed, along with 10 informational banners and two road signs.
A large-scale project implemented by the NGO is "The Map of Victories and Memory of the Ukrainian People" (grant from the Ministry of Youth and Sports). The project is dedicated to the heroization of the Ukrainian ethnicity, the search for places of victories and memory of the Ukrainian people, their localization on the map, and the description of events associated with these places. A separate website has been created for the project, which is already functioning in the beta version. There are more than 130 points on the map.
The project “Cossack Churches of Kyiv Oblast” is being implemented with the support of the Kyiv Regional State Administration and includes 27 churches and one chapel from the Cossack period, located within Kyiv Oblast. The main task of the project is the creation of digital copies of the churches for research and preservation purposes.
Some of the tasks and goals of the NGO Ukraine Incognita include:
- Creating the largest regional portal in Ukraine, containing information (both visual and semantic) about all natural and architectural monuments, all settlements with tourist and regional value for the country.
- Transforming the website into a powerful informational media resource that will contain comprehensive information about the cultural heritage of Ukraine, potential tourist attractions, and tourism infrastructure. Additionally, the website will include information not only about the monuments but also about their owners and users who are responsible for their maintenance.
- Conducting constant regional expeditions to lesser-known areas of Ukraine.
- Publishing travel guides and maps of Ukraine.
We also plan to create:
A list of valuable historical and cultural objects that urgently need help and are often completely absent from official registers of architectural, historical, and other monuments.
Special attention will be paid to Ukrainian modernism, Ukrainian baroque, and Ukrainian folk style in wooden architecture.
In its current form, the website has been active since 2009. It has been continuously updated with information by its founders and their friends. This information is original, not just “gathered” from the internet. You can read about some "non-mainstream" objects only on our pages, and there are dozens of such objects. The attention to entire categories of interesting objects for tourists and regional historians started, not least, thanks to the authors of the Ukraine Incognita website.
