Wooden Kitchen Utensil Restoration — Practice for Regional Museums
At the Pyrohiv restoration workshop a four-month conservation programme for wooden kitchen utensils — spoons, troughs, bowls, dizhas — has launched for regional museum staff.
In January 2026 a four-month wooden kitchen utensil conservation programme began at the restoration workshop of the Pyrohiv Open-Air Museum. Participants in the programme came from the Poltava Region Daily Life Museum, the Sorochynsky Fair, the Chernihiv Regional Ethnographic Centre, the Transcarpathian Open-Air Architecture Museum. The programme focuses on the most vulnerable category of peasant daily life — wooden kitchen utensil items of the 19th-20th centuries.
The curator — a restorer with twenty-five years of experience — teaches the main disciplines: identification of wood species (oak, ash, birch, linden, willow), diagnosis of biological damage (fungi, woodworm, algae), stabilisation of cracks using animal-origin glue, restoration of natural patina without modern chemical additives. A separate block is reconstruction of traditional processing techniques: fire-burning decoration on spoons, hollowing out troughs from a whole trunk, hooping dizhas. The final projects of participants will become exhibits in regional museums.
