Petro Shekeryk-Donykiv Memorial Museum, Kryivka Museum. 

Petro Shekerik-Donikov belongs to the cohort of the most famous and conscious Ukrainian Hutsuls who cared with all their hearts and souls about their native mountains, their sweet and dear Hutsul land. He fought against the invaders-conquerors of all stripes who oppressed his Hutsul brothers and destroyed their native land.

Petro Shekerik-Donikiv was born in the village of Holovy, and spent almost all his life in Zhab’ya, which Ivan Franko called the capital of Hutsulshchyna. He graduated from a four-year school, and thanks to his teacher Luka Harmatii, he was engaged in self-education, teaching his fellow countrymen to read and write.

Petro Shekerik-Donikiv was an organiser of the Sich in the Hutsul region, in Kamianets-Podilskyi and Vinnytsia. During the Polish occupation, he served in the 24th Infantry Regiment of Kolomyia and thanks to his persistence, the soldiers were allowed to speak Ukrainian. Ambassador of the Hutsuls to the Polish Sejm, active member of the Ukrainian Radical Party, organiser of volunteers for the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen. Delegate to the Ukrainian National Council of the ZUNR. Participated in the historic event of the Unification of the ZUNR and the UPR on St Sophia’s Square in Kyiv.

A native Hutsul, a son of the Carpathian Mountains, a long-time starost of the Zhabievo Commune, one of the founders and an amateur actor of the Hnat Khotkevych Hutsul Theatre in Krasnoyillia, a collector of folklore and ethnographic values, helped Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi to immerse himself in the unique and amazing Hutsul world and collect invaluable material for his literary gem, the story Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, which resulted in Serhiy Parajanov’s masterpiece film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.

According to the Polish writer Stanisław Wincenza, Petro Shekerik-Donik “was a talented man, if not a genius”. His literary masterpiece, the novel Dido Ivanchyk, written in the language of his Hutsul ancestors, is a treasure trove that will forever preserve the spirit of Hutsul identity, echoes of Hutsul antiquity, and the material and spiritual world of the Hutsul region. The novel was published 67 years later, the manuscript of which was kept by his wife Paraska and passed on to his daughter Anna, and the Hutsulshchyna Society framed the masterpiece of Hutsul old times in 2012 in the book Dido Ivanchyk.

The last page in the manuscript of the novel is dated by the author’s hand on 20 April 1940, and three weeks later Petro Shekerik-Donikov was arrested by the Muscovites. After the trial, the slave road led to Siberia, where the traces of the faithful son of Hutsulshchyna were lost forever. However, the memory of the repressed writer and public figure, the defender of the Hutsuls and his native land, lives on and will live forever. On 25 June 2018, the Petro Shekerik Donikovyi Museum was opened in the Hutsul capital, Verkhovyna. According to the writer’s descendants, Nadiya Mikivnychuk and her father Ivan Makivnychuk, the house where the memorial museum is opened has been preserved in its original form, as it was during the writer’s lifetime. Kateryna Shekeriak-Makivnychuk inherited the house: she gave it to her granddaughter Nadiya, who decided to open the museum together with her father.

The hiding place of the Ukrainian Povtan Army soldiers – one would not immediately guess that this is the entrance to a hiding place, because it looks like an ordinary water well. The founders of the museum, the Makivnychuk family from Verkhovyna, specifically designed the interior and exterior to resemble the times of the underground.