| Our History - The Mundare Museum |
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The Basilian Fathers Museum was founded in the 1950s, but its roots go back much further—to a French Canadian priest named Father Josaphat Jean. In 1910 Father Jean went to Ukraine to study the Ukrainian language and the Eastern rite. Inspired by Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytskyi, the charismatic founder of the National Museum in L’viv, Father Jean began to collect a wide variety of religious and ethnographic artifacts. These eventually found a home at the museum in Mundare. When contacts with Ukraine were cut off by the Communist regime in the 1940s, the Basilian Fathers recognized the need to preserve the cultural as well as the religious heritage of Ukrainians in Canada. In 1953 the Basilians founded a Ukrainian museum in the town of Mundare. Here, Father Jean’s valuable lifetime collection of religious artifacts found a permanent home alongside unique collections of Ukrainian Easter eggs, embroidery, weaving, pioneer tools and folk artifacts. The
museum also houses a library and archives. |
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