What do we know about the culture of the Crimean Tatars —  the indigenous people of Ukraine? What do the symbols of the traditional Ornek ornament mean? How did the Crimean Tatars dress and spend their leisure time 200 years ago? Which of the ancient traditions has been preserved to this day? What meanings unite Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians?

Crimean Tatars are an indigenous people of Ukraine whose origin and historical destiny are inextricably linked with Crimea and the Northern Black Sea Region. For centuries, the traditional culture of this community combined individual features of different civilizations: Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Central Asian. But on its way, it did not become a fragment or a periphery of any of them. It built its own identity and distinctiveness in the unique ethnic lace of Crimea.

The exhibition "MIRAS. The Heritage" is a joint project with the NGO "Alem," which protects and popularizes the Crimean Tatar intangible cultural heritage. The purpose of the exhibition is to show the culture of the Crimean Tatars as a living phenomenon with continuous traditions that still influence society's values and are part of everyday life, political culture, and relations with the surrounding world and people.

The exhibition "MIRAS. The Heritage" is the first comprehensive presentation of the most extensive collection of Crimean Tatar jewelry art items and everyday life of the 19^th-early 20^th centuries in mainland Ukraine. In particular, here you can see silver kushaks (women's waist belts) and topeliks (tops of women's headdresses), which impress with the sophistication of work in the Crimean Tatar filigree technique (19^th-early 20^th centuries, Treasury collection). Silver cases for the Koran and men's amulets, coffee dishes, traditional Crimean Tatars clothes, and gold embroidery samples are also displayed.

Spectators will be able to familiarize themselves with the customs, art, religion, and worldview traditions of the indigenous people of Crimea, thanks to the rich ornamental compositions. The masters of decorative art created them not only as an element of the interior but also invested in their works' deep meanings close to Ukrainians: the desire for well-being, a strong family, safety and protection, respect for elders, health, and connection with nature and homeland.

In the second exhibition hall, Crimea is presented through the eyes of another — on lithographs from the album of the same name by Friedrich Gross. This artist, a descendant of a German colonist, showed the traditional world of the Crimean Tatars of the first half of the 19th century when there was a living legacy of the Khan times. Many of the monuments depicted by Friedrich Gross were destroyed during russian colonization.

Project partners: Ukrainian Folk Decorative Art Museum, V. I. Vernadskyi National Library of Ukraine, Ukrainian ethnic clothing designer Olena Didyk.

The exposition presents items from the private collections of Esma Ajieva, Vitalii Provolovskyi, and Elmira Seit-Ametova.

The exhibition curators are Oleksii Savchenko, a senior researcher at the National Museum of the History of Ukraine, and Esma Ajieva, head of the NGO "Alem".

 The project is the platform that allows you to see the standard ways of thinking, feelings, and values inherent to both Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars. Interactive events planned in the exhibition space will help with this: lectures, master classes, and informal thematic meetings with Crimean Tatar artists.

The exhibition "MIRAS. The Heritage" is implemented within the framework of the NGO "Alуem" project "Senses that unite," which is carried out with the support of Switzerland, provided through SDC/CHARS (Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, Federal Department of Foreign Affairs of Switzerland (FDFA)).