Attractions of Nizhyn district

The Museum of Ukrainian-Czech-Slovak Friendship in Svitanok was opened in 1973, in Soviet times it was called the Museum of Soviet-Czechoslovak Friendship.

This place was chosen for the museum in connection with the events of 1943, when an echelon with Czechoslovak soldiers moving to the Soviet-German front was hit by a German airstrike near the Yakhnivka station. As a result, 54 soldiers died - stele and marble slabs with the names of the dead were installed on their mass grave.

The exposition of the museum is placed in 4 halls. The first hall tells about the history of the region from the times of Kyivan Rus. In the center of the exposition about the Second World War is a diorama that shows the events at the Yakhnivka station. There are documents about the participation of the Czechoslovak hero Ludvik Svoboda, who took part in the territory of Chernihiv region, first in the Soviet-Ukrainian war against the Bolshevik Red Army, then in battles against the Germans during the Second World War. The "Friendship" hall tells about friendly relations with the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Every year on Victory Day over Nazism in the Second World War and on October 14, military attachés of the Czech Republic come here to honor the memory of the fallen.

The Yuriy Lysyansky Memorial House-Museum is a department of the Ivan Spassky Nizhyn Museum of Local Lore.

The first Ukrainian traveler around the world, Yuriy Lysyansky, was a navigator, geographer, oceanographer, cartographer and ethnographer, a descendant of the Nizhyn noble Cossack-priestly family. He took part in the first circumnavigation in the history of the Russian Empire, which took place under the command of Ivan Kruzenstern. An island in Hawaii, a peninsula in Alaska, a strait, a river and a mountain in Sakhalyn are named after him.

The Lysyansky Museum is located in the house of the priest of the Church of Saint John the Theologian, in whose family the future sailor was born in 1773. The first exhibition hall with a temporary exhibition "Traveler of the Cossack family" opened in 2021. Here are some household items of the Lysyansky family - utensils, a clay Cossack pipe, etc.

Also in the exhibition you can see items related to the life of naval officers and training in the cadet corps, weapons of the time, a model of the sloop "Neva", on which Lysyansky traveled around the world.