Melitopol Museum of Local History, Melitopol
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A museum in a 1913 merchant’s mansion from which the occupiers took a collection of Scythian gold in 2022.
The museum was founded in 1921 and since 1967 has been housed in a mansion built in 1913 for a merchant of the second guild, at 18 Mykhailo Hrushevskyi Street (Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine, zabytki.in.ua). Its holdings number more than 48,000 items, among them Scythian gold of the 4th century BC from a burial mound excavated in 1954 by Oleksii Terenozhkin’s expedition (Radio Svoboda, Ukrainska Pravda). On 10 March 2022 russian soldiers detained the museum’s director Leila Ibrahimova at her home; in April the occupiers appointed a collaborator director, and after a week of searching the gold was found and taken away (Ukrainska Pravda). According to the Melitopol city council, the occupiers removed at least 1,745 items of precious metals, 277 of them gold; the collaborator was convicted on 23 October 2024, and the fate of the collection is unknown.
Melitopol has been occupied since 2022 — no access.