Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine

The most famous object in Ukraine belongs to this museum, and you probably won't see it. The gold pectoral from the Tovsta Mohyla kurgan — 1,148 grams, 30.6cm across, made for a Scythian king in the 4th century BC — came off display in the first days of the full-scale invasion, along with the whole of the nine permanent halls. Staff packed it and moved it somewhere safe. It is still safe, and still packed.

What stayed open is a working museum inside the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, running temporary exhibitions drawn from some 57,000 objects in precious metal and stone. Older Kyivans still call it the Museum of Historical Treasures; since September 2021 it has officially been the Treasury of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine. Come for what's in the cases rather than for the pectoral, and it repays the hour.

A museum with one rule

Only precious metal and gemstone get in. Age alone earns nothing; the test is the metalwork. The result runs from the 7th century BC to the 20th, nomads to Cossack silversmiths.

It started with a single dig: in 1954 Oleksii Terenozhkin opened a Scythian kurgan at Melitopol and brought up around 4,000 gold objects, more than the Kyiv history museum could handle. A resolution of 22 November 1963 created a department for them, the Golden Storeroom; the museum opened its own doors on 4 January 1969.

The building counts too. This is the Kovnir Building, a Baroque range put up in the 1720s to 1740s by the master builder Stepan Kovnir. Before it held treasure it held bread and books — the monastery's bakery and bookshop. The Second World War wrecked it, and it was rebuilt.

The pectoral, and the steppe behind it

Scythian metalwork is the core of the collection: 7th to 4th century BC, the nomads of the Black Sea steppe, the finest of it made for them by Greek goldsmiths — breast ornaments, sword and bridle fittings, dress plaques by the thousand.

Borys Mozolevskyi lifted the pectoral out of a kurgan near Pokrov on 21 June 1971, at half past two in the afternoon. Its three registers are worked in miniature: at the top, two men stitching a sheepskin while mares and cows are milked; in the middle, birds among acanthus scrolls in coloured enamel; below, griffins pulling down horses. In store beside it: the silver-gilt cup from Haimanova Mohyla, the gold facing of a gorytos from the Melitopol kurgan with the deeds of Achilles, and the unexplained gold object from Pereherieva Mohyla.

The museum's stand-in is an online exhibition, which doesn't pretend to be the same thing.

Greeks, Cossacks, Crimean Tatars

Greek jewellery from the Black Sea colonies — Olbia, Chersonesos, Panticapaeum — shows Hellenistic technique bending to local taste. Rus and Cossack silver runs to communion plate and gospel covers; the name to look for is the Kyiv goldsmith Ivan Ravych (1677–1762), who worked on Podil and signed in Latin: Fecit Ioan Ravicz Kijonix. Judaica and Crimean Tatar work fill out the rest. Twenty-seven pieces of that Cossack goldsmithing, including church donations tied to Hetman Ivan Mazepa, went on show in May 2026 as The Precious Legacy of Cossack Ukraine.

Nine years in Amsterdam

In early 2014 four Crimean museums sent loans to the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam. Russia took the peninsula while the show was still up, leaving the Dutch a question no loan agreement covers: hand the objects to Ukraine, or to museums now under occupation? Amsterdam's district court found for Ukraine in 2016, the appeal court in 2021, and on 9 June 2023 the Dutch Supreme Court dismissed the Crimean museums' last appeal. The crates reached Kyiv that November.

All 565 artefacts — 2,111 catalogued items, from Bakhchisarai, Simferopol, Kerch and Chersonesos — have been on show here since 4 July 2024 as Treasures of Crimea. The Return. The museum's wording is that they stay until Crimea is de-occupied, then go home. Look for the Scythian ceremonial helmet in gold, gold-mounted swords, torcs, and Chinese lacquer boxes about two thousand years old.

Visiting

The Treasury sits inside the Upper Lavra. It publishes two addresses — vul. Ivana Mazepy 21 and vul. Lavrska 9 — for the same door. Arsenalna and Pecherska are the nearest metro stations. It opens Tuesday to Sunday, and the ticket desk shuts well before it does. Check nmiu.org the morning you go: air-raid alerts empty the halls without warning.

Allow an hour at least. The objects are small and densely worked and don't survive being hurried — and you're already inside the Lavra grounds, the rest of the complex on the other side of the door.