Sep 2, 2025
Open to read a personal note from the artist
Personal Exhibition of Watercolors by Serhiy Sviderskyi“Crimean Journeys”at the Sholom Aleichem MuseumSeptember 2 – 21, 2025Sholom Aleichem Museum – 5 Velyka Vasylkivska St. (“Arena City”), Kyiv. Tel. (044) 235 17 34. . . .
My Crimean Story
My journeys through Crimea began in 1985. The spell of its nature, the inner calm it offered, the chance to spend entire days beneath the open sky, and the desire to preserve the memory of the places I had fallen in love with—these drew me to painting.
Between 1985 and 2000 I visited many corners of the Crimean land: the southern coast, the western shores, the central steppes, and partly the eastern reaches of the peninsula.
At every opportunity I sketched, seizing each moment with nature, discovering anew the astonishing beauty of this ancient land.
In those years I wandered through Alupka, Koreiz, Gaspra, Miskhor, Alushta, Yalta, paused in Hurzuf to admire Ayu-Dag and the Adalars, traveled to Sudak, Novyi Svit, Feodosia, Kerch, Simeiz, Ponyzivka, Katsiveli, Foros, Kastropol, Simferopol, Bakhchisarai, Vilino, Pishchane, Uhlove, Stary Krym, Hrushevka, Koktebel, and Ordzhonikidze.
The surroundings of Stary Krym and the protected Agarmysh forest above the town captivated me most of all. I climbed Mount Agarmysh many times, crossing it lengthwise and across. From Stary Krym I would set out on foot to Koktebel along the old Hrynivska Road. I visited the Armenian monastery of Surbkhach (Holy Cross) and an even older monastery higher in the mountains. More than once, I walked from Feodosia to Stary Krym, and from Yalta to Alupka.
In Feodosia I found the house where, in the 1930s, my father lived with his mother after leaving Chernivtsi. A young man then, he managed wineries, and the memory of this stirred emotions that later flowed into my watercolors. I also explored the city’s old fortifications and quarantine walls, watched fishermen working on the shore, and wandered the bustling market, where the gifts of the land glowed with color.
In the 1990s I witnessed the closing of a camp near Kiziltash on the edge of Karadag. In 1992 I experienced the surge of tsunami waves from Turkey reaching Crimea’s southern coast. During those same years, I met many Crimeans—vineyard directors, a newspaper editor, the commander of a cadet corps, a biologist-ornithologist with the finest bird egg collection in the Soviet Union. I befriended an Estonian physician at a sanatorium, local historians, and simply the people of the land.
I gazed at the stars from the bottom of the Crimean Grand Canyon, wrapped in a traveler’s blanket. I climbed Mount Boiko by way of the Kokkozka Valley, where grows the ancient Crimean tree—the large-fruited rowan, rising thirty meters high. I endured a snowstorm atop Mount Agarmysh in a shepherd’s hut, descended to the ice grotto of Tatiana’s Cave, scaled the sheer Kastropol cliffs, followed the ravines of Malyi and Velykyi Babulhan to the lakes of the Baydar Valley, and wandered the karst hollows of Besh-Tekne. I ascended Mount Villia-Burun, Trapan-Bair, and Spirady. From Simeiz I followed the ridge of Mount Kishka to the Ai-Petri Plateau. I descended once more to Besh-Tekne, crossed the forested plateau into the Baydar Valley, and climbed the Devil’s Staircase—Shaitan-Merdven.
On the southern coast I roamed most of the Ai-Petri and Yalta plateaus, and many times walked the Botkin and Taraktash trails.
In those years I also met a remarkable woman, Tamara Mykhailivna Soloschenko, who even in old age led “health hikes” through the Crimean mountains. Surely many still carry her memory with warmth and gratitude.
Altogether, I spent about seven and a half years in Crimea, with only short pauses away. Those years gave me the chance to preserve in watercolors the beloved places of this land.
Most of the works depict the southern coast and the surroundings of Stary Krym. My pencil drawings capture humble clay-and-wattle houses in Stary Krym, the Ai-Petri Plateau, and a few views of the western shore.
Yet memory still keeps many places not yet painted—waiting for their turn to come alive on paper.
Serhiy Sviderskyi