On 10 December 2024, the BNS news agency in Vilnius hosted a press conference for the project “Tiahyn Fortress as stronghold of the European history of the Ukrainian south”.
Speaking to journalists, Rita Malinauskiene, director of the Vytautas Military Museum, noted that in the time of Vytautas, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was formed through diplomacy, and that this common historical past also influences the current relations between the Ukrainian and Lithuanian peoples. Rita Malinauskiene agrees that the Grand Duchy of Lithuania can be considered a prototype of the European Union at that time. During the press conference, the museum director stressed that the theme of the exhibition about Tiahyn brought to Lithuania by Ukrainians is very important and relevant in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war. She emphasises that Russia, which is waging war against Ukraine, is trying to falsify history and erase the historical memory of Ukraine and Lithuania.
“All exhibitions in our museum go “deep” and with this exhibition we are “digging” into the topics that connect Vytautas with Ukraine. It is interesting that Ukrainians (in particular, those soldiers who were rehabilitated in Lithuania and visited the museum) know history (especially of Vytautas times) better than Lithuanians. Lithuanians like to know that in Middle Ages our country was “from sea to sea”, but they cannot connect this fact with the context. This exhibition is also very important for our archaeologists and historians,” said Rita Malinauskiene. She added that Lithuanians are more aware of what is happening in Ukraine today, they are well aware of the tragic present of the Kherson region, in particular, the Russian blown up of the Kakhovka HPP and the consequences of this catastrophe, but they know little about the common past of our countries.
The cooperation with the museum will not be limited with this exhibition, which has now been brought to Lithuania by Ukrainians. Rita Malinauskiene said that the museum are already preparing a new exhibition that will open in 2025 and will be dedicated to military engineering – fortifications from ancient times to the present. The topic of determining the line of fortifications in southern Ukraine in the time of Vytautas is very interesting.
“We have to take it from Inkerman. There is also another Vytautas fortress on the Dnipro, Dashiv (now Ochakiv). And if Inkerman is in the west and Tiahyn is in the south, then we see a line of fortresses that was somehow connected to Vytautas. Let’s not forget about the port of Kochubiyiv (present-day Odesa). There are many different legends about other fortresses along this line, archaeologists argue about this. But one way or another, this line along the Black Sea coast is connected with the construction of Vytautas‘ time,” said Svitlana Bilyaeva, PhD in Historical Sciences, head of the Southern Medieval Expedition of the Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
