Solutions from Ukraine: Zdolbuniv museum creates audio guide with veterans' voices to engage them in community cultural life
In public discourse, the voices of veterans and military personnel most often appear in the context of war, service, and lived experiences. At the same time, their participation in community cultural life and the creation of cultural products remain less visible.
For the museum, creating a new audio guide meant finding a format that would offer veterans and active-duty military personnel an opportunity to help preserve and present local history.
What's the solution?
The museum invited veterans and active service members to voice narratives about:
This created an audio guide in which their voices reach beyond the prism of war or personal military experience. They became co-creators of a museum product and active participants in a cultural dialogue with visitors.
Ten participants joined the recording session:
Ivan Savochka, Serhii Kulesha, Volodymyr Kozakov, Eduard Tsyron, Oleksandr Shpak, Oleh Hetmanchuk, Mykola Solovei, Oleksandr Moroz, Volodymyr Petrovskyi, and Viktor Savochka.
The recorded audio stories enrich the museum exhibition and guide visitors through its halls and underground spaces. As a result, visitors can not only see history but also hear it with a new sound.
The audio guide is available directly at the Zdolbuniv Local History Museum and online. Therefore, those currently unable to visit the museum in person can also access it.
This initiative demonstrates that engaging veterans and military personnel in cultural life can be achieved by co-creating concrete museum products. While an audio guide does not exhaust the possibilities of such involvement, it serves as a practical step toward turning the museum into a space for interaction where diverse community members gather to preserve and reflect on shared history.
Listen to the audio guide online.
Background
It should be noted that the Ukrainian documentary film Theater of Veterans won the Best Documentary Film award at the Cine Paris International Film Festival in Paris. The film tells the story of male and female veterans with severe injuries, amputations, and psychological trauma who return to active life through theatrical art.
Additionally, reports indicated that an inclusive open-air stage, the Unbroken Resilience Theater, opened in Zamarkstyniv Park in Lviv. Its inaugural production featured the play To the Light and Back (Do svitla i nazad) by Russo-Ukrainian War veteran Andrii Hryhoriev, which explores military experiences through the imagery of purgatory, heaven, and hell.
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21 of September 2026
