Now, like many cities across the country, Odessa, founded by Catherine the Great in the late 1700s, with its perfectly preserved 19th Century architecture and beautiful neo-baroque Opera House, prepares for attack.
The museum's acting director, Oleksandra Kovalchuk, fled to Bulgaria for the sake of her one-year-old son. But she's terribly torn.
The video showed a queue snaking around the outside of the Odessa Fine Art Museum. It was Sunday February 20, and perhaps the last time people were lining up to look at its treasures (10,000 artworks from the 16th Century onwards, including early paintings by Odessa's own, the abstract art pioneer, Wassily Kandinsky).
Just four days later, the Russians invaded Ukraine.
Now, like many cities across the country, Odessa, founded by Catherine the Great in the late 1700s, with its perfectly preserved 19th Century architecture and beautiful neo-baroque Opera House, prepares for attack. The museum's acting director, Oleksandra Kovalchuk, fled to Bulgaria for the sake of her one-year-old son. But she's terribly torn.
In the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, another museum director, Olesia Ostrovska-Liuta, has made a different but equally difficult decision. She's staying put, although she told me "we are all under shelling."
The Mystetskyi Arsenal is one of Europe's largest art museums, holding Ukrainian avant-garde and contemporary works. Protecting them is her mission."
Ukraine is home to seven Unesco world heritage sites, including the St Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv with its wonderful golden domes and stunning Byzantine fresco of the Virgin Mary as well as the historic architectural showpiece at the centre of Lviv in the west.
As Anna Reid, author of Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine, puts it, bombing Lviv, Odessa, Kyiv or Chernihiv to the north, with its medieval churches, monasteries and peerless collection of icons will be "a cultural loss to Europe on the scale of the destruction of Dresden in World War Two."
