Меморіальний музей тоталітарних режимів “Територія терору”

The museum is located in Lviv on the grounds of the former ghetto (1941-1943) and transit prison No. 25 (1944-1955). It was established in 2009 by the Lviv City Council and the museum complex was constructed between 2014-2016. The museum serves as a platform for discussing and reflecting on historical and current traumas to promote a tolerant and inclusive society. It also aims to memorialize the complex legacy left behind after World War II and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The museum's team has carried out various projects including the "Memory of Ukraine" project. As part of this project, 20 oral history interviews were conducted with eyewitnesses from different parts of Western Ukraine. Based on these testimonies, 8 media stories were created and shared through platforms like Radio Svoboda, Korydor, Istorychna Pravda, and Hromadske. Additionally, the project culminated in an art exhibition by performance artist Victoria Romanchuk.

The Lost Childhood project is currently ongoing. It is a collaborative effort between the Czech NGO Post Bellum and the museum staff, with support from the House of Europe. The project aims to create a platform called "Lost Childhood" to showcase 30 oral history interviews with individuals who witnessed violence, repression, and crimes against humanity as children. Additionally, the Unheard project involves a series of video and audio interviews with eyewitnesses of events from 1930-1950, discussing their experiences of extreme violence during the mid-twentieth century.

Another ongoing initiative is the digitization of the Territory of Terror museum's collection. With support from the Museum Berlin-Karlshorst and the New Museum NGO, 50 artefacts from the museum were scanned by the Skeiron team in 2022.

Since its establishment, the museum has not only showcased a main exhibition dedicated to the victims of Nazi and Soviet terror and a collection of Soviet monumental art but has also hosted various temporary exhibitions. The Garden exhibition focused on Soviet monumental art, while exhibitions such as Lviv'43: City of (Non) Memory and There Was High Grass highlighted the Holocaust. Furthermore, the museum hosted the travelling exhibition "Protecting Memory: Holocaust Mass Graves in Ukraine", created by the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies, with funding from the German Foreign Office.

In response to Russia's full-scale invasion, the museum team has organized several exhibitions focusing on the current war. One of these exhibits is the Open Funds exhibition, which showcases battle trophies such as fragments of Russian soldiers' equipment, propaganda materials, children's drawings, letters to Russian soldiers, and a collection of paintings by contemporary artists evacuated from Kyiv, belonging to the private gallery The Naked Room. Additionally, there are exhibitions dedicated to fallen soldier and poet Maksym Kryvtsov titled "Next: I Will Take Back My Life" as well as the exhibitions "Olenivka" and "On the Edge" featuring works by artists from Sloviansk that explore the tragic pages in the city's history related to Russia's current war against Ukraine.

Lviv and other cities and towns in the western region of Ukraine

The museum's collection and acquisition committee selects items for the museum's collections that reflect the experiences of Lviv residents during the twentieth-century terror, particularly under Nazi and Soviet rule. This includes materials like artifacts, household items, photographs, documents, and written sources from pre-World War II Lviv, highlighting the contrast between their peaceful pre-war life and the years of hardship that followed. The collection also features materials depicting the tragic stories of human destinies during the Nazi and Soviet regimes, as well as monuments and art from the Soviet era. Additionally, the museum displays photo and video materials from the Revolution of Dignity, as well as items and propaganda materials from the Russian military's invasion of Ukrainian lands

The museum's collection currently comprises over 19,000 exhibits, divided into the main and research and auxiliary funds, covering the period from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the present day. A significant milestone for the museum's collection department was the acquisition of a storage facility in 2019. Currently, the museum's collection includes a wide variety of items, with a majority consisting of photo and video materials and interviews with survivors of Nazi and Soviet terror.