As noted by WHYY, Ukrainian has become the seventh audio guide language offered by the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia for the final two months of “The Declaration’s Journey” exhibition.
When the exhibition opened in October 2025, it featured an optional audio tour available in six languages: English, Spanish, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Mandarin Chinese. The new Ukrainian audio tour is not available for the museum’s core exhibition, which remains in English, Spanish, and French.
The addition came through the support of Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska, who launched an initiative in 2019 to bring Ukrainian language material into museums around the world. There are now more than 135 museums in 59 countries carrying these audio guides, including the Palace of Versailles, the Colosseum, the Tower of London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, according to VOA News reporting.
The aim of these guides is to ensure that wherever Ukrainians may find themselves, they can hear important things in their native language, and that Ukrainian can be heard freely, on an equal footing with other languages of the world,
Zelenska said in a video message.
As reported by VOA News, the Museum of the American Revolution is the sole Philadelphia-area venue participating in the project, marking the fifth museum nationwide to roll out Ukrainian-language audio guides. Philadelphia holds the second-largest population of people of Ukrainian heritage in the country, trailing only New York City. U.S. Census data shows about 11,000 Ukrainian immigrants live in Philadelphia alongside roughly 50,000 residents with Ukrainian backgrounds.
There’s a decent size Ukrainian American population and recent immigrants from Ukraine here in the Philadelphia region,
said Matthew Skic, the museum’s director of collections and exhibitions, as reported by WHYY. It’s a great way to expand the accessibility of this exhibit.
During the official presentation held at the museum on October 22, Tyler Putman, senior manager of gallery interpretation, noted the significance of the integration. VOA News reported that Putman emphasized how the exhibition explores the influence of the U.S. Declaration of Independence over the past 250 years, featuring Ukraine’s Declaration of Independence alongside documents from other nations.
To be able to offer Ukrainians and Ukrainian speakers a resource in their own language in order to explore The Declaration’s Journey, and the chance to better understand how independence movements across time and space inform each other and connect people from disparate corners of the world, is a great honor for our institution,
Putman said, according to VOA News.
Denys Sienik, Ukraine’s chargé d’affaires in the United States, also spoke at the event, noting that the language represents national identity and resilience against historical suppression, VOA News reported. The museum’s acquisition of the audio guide was facilitated by Iryna Mazur, who serves as both the honorary consul of Ukraine in Philadelphia and the president of the Ukrainian Federation of America.
