Is it possible to forget pain, even if it is not physical? It is possible. And how much such pain did the aggressor country bring us? A lot of it. But we have learned to pick ourselves up piece by piece, moving on, pretending to be used to it. If we were asked to recall all the moments when Russia killed, destroyed, destroyed or plundered, we would hardly be able to list them all. Unfortunately, our brains have a tendency to forget. But there are things that we simply have no moral right to forget...

This opinion is definitely shared by the NGO Association Noosphere. This is a team focused on STEM, popularizing science and modern technologies among young people, and creating favorable conditions for the development of an innovative business environment in Ukraine. However, they have recently tried their hand at something out of their character, but very important. The NGO Association Noosphere, with the support of the ARPI, developed and implemented the project “The Heritage We Are Losing: We Can't Forget, We Must Remember.” The project was designed to convey to its participants the value and uniqueness of heritage sites from Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions that were destroyed or occupied by the Russians. The NGO team also wanted to show the importance of popularizing such sites and the inadmissibility of forgetting them.

Darya Novikova, a native of Zaporizhzhia Oblast - the currently occupied part of it - the village of Yakymivka, project coordinator, PR specialist, and recently grant manager at the NGO Association Noosphere, told us more about the project. So what was the impetus for people working with STEM to work with heritage? According to the project coordinator, there were two factors that pushed the team to decide to develop such a project. The first was her personal nostalgia and pain due to her internal rejection of what the aggressor country was doing to Daria's native land. The second factor was the team's desire to support the internally displaced persons with whom the organization works. “Association Noosphere” decided to highlight in their exhibition the objects that are located in the territories native to these people and once again emphasize that we have not forgotten about these monuments, they are exclusively Ukrainian and no one can take them away from us. “Our team had the resources, the desire, and the idea, so we decided to try our hand at a new direction.”

The basis of the project “The Heritage We Are Losing: We Can't Forget, We Must Remember” was the creation of an artistic and informational exhibition telling about the objects destroyed by the enemy and a promotional video. The NGO team chose 12 cultural monuments to work with: 3 for each of the 4 regions. Among the objects destroyed by the occupiers are the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station and the summer theater of Nova Kakhovka, which were blown up and flooded in 2023, the “Grandfather” mound, which is being deliberately destroyed by Russians with the help of construction equipment, the Mariupol mosaics that were damaged by bombing and dismantled in 2024, and the “Popov Estate”, which was heartlessly robbed and shot. The Noosphere Association also visited a number of monuments that are under occupation and their fate is unknown, namely the Amvrosiivka Paleolithic site, Mergelova Hrida, Bilovodsk Horse Farms, Askania Nova, Mamai-Hora, and Stone Graves. The final event of the project was the opening of the exposition, during which not only the stands and the film were presented, but also a lecture on “Preservation and Protection of Cultural Heritage in Time of War” and a Q&A session were held.

Daria recalls the implementation of the project as follows: “The work started calmly and smoothly, we distributed the list of responsibilities, drew up a roadmap, and started working. However, there were a lot of “asaps” in the process: we didn't have time for something, something took a long time to edit, such as the texts for the banners, and it took a long time to coordinate various processes. However, everything turned out the way we imagined it. Of course, we would have liked more people to come to the opening of the exhibition, but it was August, with active shelling, so we considered the result of just over 50 visitors to be satisfactory. But we did not expect how the project spread online, we had really good results - more than a million views on the video. This is a great indicator for us.” The team also worked well with journalists to reach the audience comprehensively. Thus, socially important information about the destruction of our cultural heritage by the Russians was included in 11 media publications and one television broadcast.

These project results show that Ukrainians are concerned about this topic. But so that our conclusions are not just assumptions, Daria also told us what the public reaction was: “The feedback was mostly positive. Of the people from the community who know our NGO as a STEM organization, no one had any questions: “What does the heritage have to do with us?”. They also supported and emphasized the importance of the project topic. There were also some rather ambiguous comments on Facebook under the video, mostly about “out of time,” “betrayal,” and so on. But we don't pay attention to such things.”

Daria also shared that for the team of the NGO Association Noosphere, heritage is not just about a mysterious building or an interesting story, it is a key aspect of our identity, awareness of ourselves as Ukrainians, studying and accepting our past. It is also a source of inspiration for future changes. So can it be “out of time”? “Unfortunately, we have hundreds of internal problems in our country, which became even more noticeable during the war. However, this does not mean that the heritage is “out of date,” on the contrary. Preserving, protecting, and popularizing it is something that any conscious, caring citizen can do, and it is something that unites us, both in the process of working on such projects and as a result of their subsequent impact on society. So while other pressing issues from the “urgent” category, as well as the actual war, divide us into Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking, left-bank and right-bank, working with cultural heritage unites us, and this is a much more important factor in this whole story.”

So, don't be afraid to take on something new and perhaps not your usual thing. Working with heritage can be your small contribution to our victory. This is how Association Noosphere successfully implemented a project that, at first glance, is not related to their field of activity and reminded us all that we must not forget. We hope that very soon our cultural monuments will be de-occupied, but we will never forgive the enemy for those that have been destroyed.

This publication were developed by NGO Agency for Private Initiative Development within the project Revealing the potential of heritage for the economic development of small communities and were made possible by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the generous support of the American people through USAID HOVERLA Activity. The contents of this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government.