Fire nearly completely destroys 4,000-piece Abkhazian art collection

A big fire burned up almost all of the art in Abkhazia, a region in Georgia that is controlled by Russia.

Over 4,000 paintings at the National Art Gallery in the capital Sukhumi burned in a fire and were destroyed.

The fire spread fast in the old building from the 1900s that was made of wood. It had a lot of Abkhazian art inside.

Researchers believe that the fire might have started because of a problem with the electrical wiring.

A video on social media showed big fires inside the building.

300 artworks by the famous artist Alexander Chachba-Shervashidze were ruined.

The head of the national gallery, Suram Sakanya, said that the collection made it through the civil war in Abkhazia in the 1990s and it was a huge loss for Abkhaz culture.

“We have been collecting these things since 1963, but they caught on fire and were destroyed in just a few seconds. ” The director said it’s a sad event for us in Abkhazia.

Local artists had been asking for a better place to keep their special art collection for a while. Before the fire, a video showed paintings stacked together in two small rooms without enough protection.

Abkhazia is a place in Georgia that gets help from Russia and is next to Russia.

The area had a war with Georgia and separated from it in 1999, but not many other countries recognize it as independent.

After the war between Georgia and Russia in 2008, Moscow said that it sees the country as its own separate state. Georgia says that Russia is controlling Abkhazia.

Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili said the fire was “a sad event for everyone”.

“I am upset about the result of ignoring our cultural identity by the leaders and Russian occupiers,” she wrote on X, which was previously known as Twitter.

Russia said it will send experts to Sukhumi to help fix the 150 paintings that were saved from the fire.