The rare museum curiosities, which had been restored in Kyiv, belong to a period of the 17th-19th centuries. They are written in Latin, Polish, and Turkish. All of them relate to the life of secular and ecclesiastical communities of Volyn region, although their geography is much wider – Lutsk, Olyka, Turiisk, Liuboml, Mannheim (Germany), Warsaw (Poland), Crimea. The exhibition presents six parchment documents and one document on rag paper. The oldest among the parchments is the royal privilege for fairs and markets for the citizens of Volyn town Mylianovychi, dated to 1646. The youngest of parchment manuscripts comes from the year 1840; having been almost entirely destroyed by fire, it became readable after the complete restoration.
One of the rare museum findings over time is the three elegant handwritten large-size pages of keyed gradual – a liturgical book of the Roman rite of various Mass hymns; the pages were found in Old Lutsk. After their accurate restoration, the issue of their temporal attribution becomes more important: especially as there is evidence of a similar choir book being preserved in Lutsk in 1642. The collection of Volyn museum also preserves rare examples of unified Missals – liturgical books of the Roman Mass, in which the liturgical texts and chants are combined. They will also take their place in the exhibition. Most of the manuscripts are available to a wider audience for the first time.
