WORLD VYSHYVANKA DAY is celebrated every year on the third Thursday of May. This year's World Vyshyvanka Day on 15 May is dedicated to the Ukrainian cultural heritage from territories, which are temporary occupied by Russia.

The scale of the destruction of Ukrainian cultural heritage is enormous: Russia has destroyed more than 2,000 cultural sites and about 200 million books, occupied about 100 museums, stolen and taken away almost 2 million treasures. The Russians are stealing our cultural heritage.The enemy's plan is to destroy our cultural codes, because cultural heritage is a proof of the identity.

The “Occupied Heritage” is a large-scale research and reconstruction project aimed at recreating traditional men's and women's attires from the Ukrainian regions, which are temporarily occupied by Russia.

The project was implemented by the non-governmental organisation “World Vyshyvanka Day” and the Centre for Folklore and Ethnography of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv with the support of the international foundation ALIPH and the European Union. 

Within five months period, researchers recreated 12 complete garments from Luhansk, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia regions, as well as from Crimea, based on ancient models. The researchers conducted extensive background research in state museums and private collections to find the pieces to be recreated.

As a result of this project, it was possible to recreate complete attires of unique cultural value from the temporary occupied regions, where Ukrainian cultural heritage was largely destroyed by Russia or transferred to the country-aggressor.