Attractions of Oleshky

The Oleshky Museum of Local Lore was opened in 1962 in the house of the secretary of the Oleshky city administration, Tsyurupa, where his son Oleksandr was born in 1870, a future Soviet party figure, head of State Planning and People's Commissar of Trade.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the memorial museum named after Tsyurupa was repurposed as a museum of local history.

It is a museum complex of historical, local history and ethnographic directions.

The original monument in the form of a wooden bell was installed in Oleshky next to the place where the Oleshky Zaporizhzhia Sich existed in 1711-1728.

It was founded at the confluence of the Kinka River with the Lazniuk River by the Zaporizhzhia Cossacks, who moved from under the oppression of the Russian Tsar to the protectorate of the Crimean Khanate. Here the chieftain of Kost Hordiyenko and the son of Hetman Pylyp Orlyk Hryhoriy, whom his father sent to the Zaporizhzhians on a secret mission, discussed plans for the liberation of Ukraine. In 1728, dissatisfied with the oppression of the Tatars, the Zaporizhzhians left Oleshky Sich and returned to Zaporizhzhia.

The house-museum of the self-taught artist Polina Rayko was opened in her native Oleshky in 2004, after her death.

Polina Rayko, a master of naïve art, a poorly educated village woman, began to create at the age of 69 after a series of life tragedies - the loss of her husband and daughter, the imprisonment of her son. In order not to feel alone in an empty house, she began to paint the walls with murals. By the end of her life, she managed to paint all five rooms: the walls, ceilings, doors of the house, as well as the porch and gate of her yard. In her works secular, Christian and pagan symbols are intertwined.

The house-museum of Polina Rayko is cared for by the Polina Rayko Charitable Foundation.

On the night of June 6, 2023, during the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian troops blew up the dam of the Kakhovka HPP, which caused a catastrophic flooding of the lower Dnipro. As a result, the house-museum of Polina Rayko was completely flooded by the waters of the Dnipro.