Oleksiy Brytyuk, archaeologist and civic activist

Historian, archaeologist and civic activist Oleksiy Brytyuk used to work on an inventory of the cultural heritage of Luhansk city and Luhansk oblast and cooperated with the Human Rrights Centre “Postup”. Brytyuk worked on the project of industrial tourism in the region (fromin the town of Alchevsk), and organized guided tours. He was a founder and chief of the Archaeologists’ movement «Luhansk Archaeology Union». This organization, as Oleksandr Bilokobylskyi puts it, «did the things nobody else cared about – fighting for preserving historic monuments some of them older than one hundred years» («Oleksiy Brytyuk and his live history», Realnaya Gazeta). Brityuk has written several publications about archaeological monuments in Luhansk and about their destruction today as well as made research on corruption in this field. He fought against the plundering of kurgans, burial grounds. Brytyuk has been an active participant of Euromaidan in Luhansk, and due to this fact was forced to leave the city in spring 2014. He died after an illness in 2016 in Krakow, Poland.

Photo by Sergoo Volchanskii