About the work on the Project – Digital Memory Storage

In June–July 2025, the project "Digital Memory Storage: The Archive of Maria Viazmitina (1896–1994)" was implemented on the initiative of Oleksandra Buzko, Head of the Scientific Archive. With fellowship support from the Freie Universität Berlin and the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM, Austria), the "Nisa" section of the vast archive of the prominent Ukrainian archaeologist, orientalist, and art historian was described and digitized. Next year marks the 130th anniversary of the scholar’s birth, and the project is planned to continue.

In addition to Oleksandra Buzko, two groups of students were involved in describing the files and writing the annotations as part of their internship at the archive. Students of the 3rd year of the History Faculty at Borys Hrinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University - Tetiana Vaskevych, Sviatoslav Hamaliia, Yeva Hrabovets, Sofiia Klymenko, Vladyslav Kuzmenko, Kateryna Pylyponchyk, and Mykhailo Khomenko - helped sort the correspondence and field diaries, number the pages, and scan the documents. Students of the Department of Cultural Studies at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy - Vladyslav Voznyi, Myroslava Hromova, Anastasiia Latypova, Denys Popov, and Diana Reskalenko - helped organize, number, and digitize the photographs and documents. Several files were digitized with the assistance of the Scientific Archive’s archivists - Daryna Romanenko, Halyna Stanytsina, and Olha Kovalchuk - as well as Ivan Ivanov. Many thanks to everyone involved!

As always, special thanks to Nika Havrysh for the photo session.

The work was carried out live in the archive during June and early July 2025. Around four thousand scans of paper documents were produced, including more than a thousand pages of correspondence, 2,500 pages of manuscripts and typescripts, and about 500 photographs. Website content upload was then carried out by Oleksandra Buzko and Daryna Romanenko.

As part of the project, a separate description of the section of Maria Viazmitina’s archive related to the 1946–1949 excavations at New Nisa in Turkmenistan was created.

All materials on the website are presented in two languages - Ukrainian and English.

The website is based on the open source content management system WordPress and is hosted by Hostinger. The Archival website is a subdomain (2nd level subdomain) to the main domain. Website address: https://viazmitina-archive.iananu.digital

This is the fourth website of the archival initiative Digital Memory Storage.
The first was dedicated to the archaeologist Serhii Hamchenko (https://hamchenko-archive.iananu.digital),
the second - to the ethnographer, anthropologist, archaeologist, and public figure Khvedir Vovk (http://vovk-archive.iananu.digital),
and the third - to the writer, ethnographer, archaeologist, and linguist Viktor Petrov-Domontovych (http://petrov-domontovych-archive.iananu.digital).

The first projects were developed by programmer Volodymyr Mysak. Volodymyr is currently serving in the army, so he was replaced by Oleksandra Buzko.

Websites are united by a landing page https://archive.iananu.digital (web developer Diego Thon, artwork by Iryna Glik, web design by Oleksandra Buzko).

The client part of the site (frontend) was created using the professional theme for WordPress Bold Photography Pro from the CATCH THEMES group, including the thematically selected functional part. The layout is adaptive for all types of devices (PC, tablets, mobile phones). About 30 plugins and widgets are used, among them: different types of galleries and sliders, bilingualism (Ukrainian and English version), structure of categories and cases, security plugins. More than 3 GB of photo materials are uploaded to the site, which are grouped into 16 categories and 138 key objects (69 in English + 69 in Ukrainian). Moderators of different access levels have the ability to create and edit site content.

As of July 26, 2025, the website features the following sections of documents: Correspondence (letters by Maria Viazmitina, Maria Novytska, Galina Pugachenkova, and Mikhail Masson, as well as letters from Vsevolod Zummer); Photographs from Nisa (landscapes, images of finds, portraits, and other photographs); Field Documentation (Maria Viazmitina’s field diaries from 1946 to 1949); Notes, Outlines, Drawings, Sketches; and a section titled Articles (including selected published articles on the excavations at Nisa by Mikhail Masson and Galina Pugachenkova, as well as the typescript of Maria Viazmitina’s previously unpublished article on Parthian warriors riding a war elephant).

An online version of the book is also available on the website: Buzko Oleksandra. Maria Viazmitina: Archaeological Expedition to Parthia (With Selected Letters and the Scholar’s Article). Kyiv: Institute of Archaeology of the NAS of Ukraine, 2025. The book is dedicated to an episode from the biography of Maria Viazmitina (1896–1994), a Ukrainian archaeologist, art historian, and orientalist. In the 1940s, she participated in the Soviet Southern Turkmenistan Comprehensive Archaeological Expedition led by Mikhail Masson, where she headed a separate unit working on the settlement and necropolis of the Parthian New Nisa (Turkmenistan). In addition to a biographical sketch, the book includes Maria Viazmitina’s correspondence during the ex pedition and her article about Parthian warriors, which, unfortunately, was not published. In the article, based on two fragments of a terracotta slab she discovered during the excavations, the researcher reconstructed the original image and proved that Parthian warriors were riding a war elephant. Almost 70 years later, after a Russian archaeologist discovered Maria Viazmitina’s manuscript in Tashkent and excavated the site, his new findings confirmed the accuracy of the reconstruction by the Ukrainian scholar. This publication is intended for a broad audience with interests in archaeology, history, cultural studies, oriental studies, art history, and military history. Additionally, the book’s materials may hold relevance from a postcolonial studies perspective.