Skeiron: the digital bomb shelter where young technicians preserve Ukraine’s cultural treasure

In the computer image the structure of the Saint Sophia Cathedral in kyivwhose curves and lines make up, more than a plane, a score. His more than 900-year-old skeleton rotates on the screen because there have been people who have dedicated themselves to encrypt every corner into zeros and ones, reduce every corner to the elementary particles of computingthe filigrees, the serene gazes of the angels and saints of the frescoes of the Byzantine interior, and the harmony of golden, green and white roundness of its baroque exterior.

It will be a year since A Russian missile collapsed part of the main apse of the temple, included in the UNESCO world heritage list. But if another bombing ever brings down the Sobor Sviatoyi Sofiyi, as they call it in ukrainian, a digital twin keeps your proportions with millimeter accuracya catalog of measures to rebuild it as it was.

The authors of this resurrection plan are the members of a team calling themselves Skeiron, and who are rushing to preserve Ukraine’s cultural legacy. In the middle of the war, seeing their culture threatened, they launched #SaveUkrainianHeritagecampaign under which they have gone creating exact digital copies of 200 endangered cultural assets based on patience, surveyor’s rules, 3D scans and photogrammetry with the machines they have been able to collect, generators when the Kremlin leaves them without electricity, and accommodation provided by neighbors on their rescue trips.

Yuri Prepodobnyione of the founders, after four years of continuous work fearing some disaster, a collapse, a fire, an explosion, believes that The destruction of cultural heritage “is a war crimewithout a doubt, as obvious as that day follows night.”

Race against bombs

UNESCO keeps count of the other victims of the Ukrainian war. It periodically publishes lists of assets affected by the Russian attack. On April 15, the date of the last balance sheet, there were 526 cultural places damaged, of which 153 are religious temples and 275 are buildings of historical-artistic interest. Bombs, missiles and drones have also hit 39 museums, 33 monuments, 21 libraries, four archaeological sites and an archive cultural.

Skeiron is a race against the bombs, scan before something irreparable happens. The war has forced them to expand the list of treasures that they have reproduced in digital twins. There is not only the Cathedral of Saint Sophia, but also the Cathedral of Saint George of Lviv (or Lviv), jewel of the late baroque World Heritage Site, or the rresidence of the metropolitan bishops from Bukovina and Dalmatia, dozens of castles and palaces from all over Ukraine, churches of the historic center from Lviv and a group of wooden temples of the Carpathians Ukrainians that, without a digital copy, would be unrecoverable if hit by a drone or a missile.

There are also deceased buildings in its catalogue. Time passes quickly, some wars overlap with previous ones, some tragedies eclipse others, and it seems like a distant case. Mariupol Drama Theater massacre. But it was not decades ago, but in March 2022, when a Russian bomb fell on the people who had taken refuge there, leaving more than 500 bodies and the building in ruins. The refugees had clearly written the word Дети (children, in Russian) on the door.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who now controls the city, ordered the reconstruction of the theaterwhich reopened in 2025, but for these technicians what is valuable is “our digital ghost,” they say. They maintain that the building no longer exists as it was, but it does survives in digitalization that they had been able to carry out before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with the help of partners who took the measures and with a photo collection campaign, thousands of archive images that neighbors sent them.

Millimeter copy

Yuri Prepodobnyi says that precision is his obsession. “Our models have a margin of error of only one to five millimeters. It is the level that allows architects and restorers to use the data as a basis for their professional work. From our point clouds, architects can create dimensioned plans, measure deformations in walls, structural inclinations or detect cracks.”

The twins that Skeiron’s young people build on their computers are not only 3D models, they are also libraries of engineering and architectural data, something like the genetic code of the building that they want to preserve.

Prepodobnyi says that the choice of each building “has never been a whim, but a response to real threats and requests for specialists.” When the invasion broke out, they set out to scan the most valuable things they had on hand in Lviv, following the UNESCO heritage list. After, Requests came from kyiv, from the capital’s cathedral, or from the University of Chernivtsi… “We no longer choose which object to reproduce. Professional heritage protectors know better what is priority. We are only instruments,” he explains.

From hobby to mission

Skeiron was born in Lviv, in 2016. On the other side of Ukraine, a bitter war was already raging, but not as big as the one the country suffers today. Two years ago, Russia had taken over Crimea, but even in old Lviv the youth lived without the pressing anticipation of a large-scale invasion.

Script for a series about kids nerd: tres amigos de instituto, Andrii Hryvniak, Volodymir Zaiats and Yuri Prepodobnyi, se juntan around “una idea “That arose from pure student curiosity,” says the latter. “So photogrammetry and drones were something new, futuristic. We wanted to see what would happen, and over time the adventure became the work of our life,” he says.

First they portrayed their own institute in 3D. At the beginning, when they begin to go out to the streets of the old town to capture digital copies of buildingsa large group of young people joins them, freaks of science and computers. Calculation and machines bring them closer to art with an unprecedented perspective. Adult life takes over, some need to earn a living and leave; The gang that wanders around Lviv with strange cameras and measuring sticks is reduced, until it becomes the three founders who operate today, and who have ended up turning their teenage game into a company.

Yuri is a geodesist, a professional in the study and measurement of the shapes and dimensions of the Earth. His two colleagues are computer technicians. The war crossed their path, turning their hobby into a mission: “We realized how vital it is to digitize our history before it disappears”says the group’s spokesperson.

Trump turned off the tap

The Skeiron project has not been spared the impact of geostrategic changes. One of the most damaging blows it has taken came from Washington, not Moscow, when the administration Trump decided to end the USAID program that distributed American international aid all over the world.

Skeiron was one of USAID’s beneficiary projects, but the tap was cut off. “It’s very discouraging -they lament in Skeiron-. We had an ambitious plan: a large multi-year project to train students. We wanted to pass on our knowledge to the next generation of specialists.”

Until now they have received financial oxygen from the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Zones, the ALIPH Foundationbased in Switzerland, a kind of Red Cross of stones, books and canvases.

In 2022, the war had just started, they were also hired by the Polonika Institute, public entity based in Warsaw that is dedicated to the preservation of the Polish legacy spread throughout Europe, and it reached them a key help from Google. With both supports they were able to continue working in a country at war.

There is also specific aid from their own country. He UAAC, Ukrainian Art Aid Centerhas given them a scanner and a server, their base hardware when the Russian bombings multiplied their work. Before the war, They had scanned 50 buildings and objects of artistic heritage. Since the invasion, there have already been another 200. In five of them damaged by bombs and drones, the data taken by the three friends is the basis for their reconstruction. Among them, the Saint Sophia Cathedral in kyiv, two churches in Chernihiv and a house on Kornovatsia Street in Lviv, a neighborhood of beautiful 19th century residential buildings whose impact by the missiles led the city council to launch a charitable campaign between companies to promote their salvation: It is titled “Adopt a House.”

“To keep pace, we often skip color scanning, which takes much more time, and focus solely on geometry,” explains Prepodobnyi. And when difficulties appear, they pull what calls “Ukrainian flexibility”, the ability to react required by war. Is there no light? They go to a neighbor who has. That a bombing has destroyed the power plant? They install solar panels, buy generators, they make a living. “We are well trained,” he ironically, before telling a detail that makes them proud. Its scanning and photogrammetry method has become a mandatory requirement of the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture. “Thanks to our standard, restoration today is based on precise measurements, not fantasies”, he assures.

Someday the war will end, the dazed races to shelters under the drone of drones will end, the nightly lottery of explosions in the rear cities will end, and Skeiron’s people will still be active. “The thing is This work does not depend only on war -explains the geodesist-. Monuments can also collapse due to the passage of time, or due to pure negligence.”

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