Kuyalnyk Cemetery Cross Catalog
Georeferencing of the largest preserved Cossack cemetery in Ukraine — the spatial foundation for Pixelated Realities' documentary catalog of 32 stone crosses dated from 1791.
Kuyalnyk Cemetery in Odesa is the largest preserved Cossack cemetery in Ukraine, also known as the Sotnykivska Sich cemetery on Shkodova Hora — a historical site spanning the second half of the 18th century to the end of the 19th. The grounds hold over five hundred burials, around two hundred of them marked with stone crosses.
The catalog, produced by the Pixelated Realities team, documents 32 crosses and grave slabs dated from 1791 to the 20th century — every tombstone bearing inscriptions or carved signs. Digitization allows researchers to examine the surfaces with greater accuracy and decipher signs that were previously hard to read; inscriptions on three crosses were clarified in the course of the work. The project aims to preserve and study this heritage and to secure cultural heritage status not only for the cemetery territory but for individual crosses.
The map component: digitizing the cemetery territory from aerial photography and georeferencing the project data — the spatial foundation that ties the documented crosses to their exact locations on the ground.
Survey chronology: 4 crosses photogrammetrically scanned in September 2022; 23 crosses scanned and 5 photo-documented in October 2023. The next stage is an online version of the catalog and refinement of the cross descriptions.
The catalog forms part of the digital collection of the Museum of Ukrainian Victory. Created by NGO Pixelated Realities within the project “Support for the Implementation of the Cultural Development Strategy of Odesa,” funded by the European Union (EU4Culture).