The idea of honoring Skovoroda at Pan-Ivanivka, as the village was then called, was first proposed in 1922 by the historian Dmytro Bahalii, who wrote to the head of education urging a museum on the estate. It took fifty years to arrive. Before then the building served as a school, and in 1960 it briefly housed a modest volunteer-run museum. Only in 1972, on the 250th anniversary of the philosopher's birth, did the state museum finally open in the old Kovalivsky manor. Assembling it was a labor of scholarship: staff from the Kharkiv Historical Museum gathered exhibits from libraries and collections across Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv, and Kharkiv. In 2008, a presidential decree granted the museum national status, cementing its place among Ukraine's most cherished cultural sites.

The collection gathered here tried to conjure the whole restless life of a man who traveled Europe and never owned a home. Four halls held its treasures: engravings of the European cities Skovoroda had visited, models of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and the Kharkiv Collegium where he studied and taught, the manuscript of his poem "Dream," and folk ceramics and embroidery softening the walls. Among the most affecting objects were the intimate ones: a violin the philosopher is said to have played, an eighteenth-century English watch that may have been his, and a chest belonging to the Kovalivsky family that Skovoroda himself used. Outside, a garden park laid out as a near-perfect square, its seven linden alleys crossing at the center, preserved the well, the site of his first burial, and monuments raised to his memory.

The museum had been closed for restoration, its walls being readied for Skovoroda's 300th anniversary, when the invasion reached it. At eleven o'clock on the night of May 6, 2022, a missile struck the roof and set the building ablaze. The fire raced through every room, injuring the guard on duty and gutting some 280 square meters of the interior. Yet the outer walls held. Staff, anticipating danger, had already moved the most valuable exhibits to safety, and in the days after, a statue of the philosopher was pulled intact from beneath the ashes. His gravestone and a memorial bust, standing apart from the building, survived untouched. There was something bitterly fitting in it: the world had come once more for Skovoroda, and once more it had not managed to catch him.

In the wake of the strike came an outpouring of resolve to restore what was lost. Restorers judged that the building could be rebuilt and the barely-damaged sculpture repaired. The national postal service issued a charity stamp block titled "Garden of Divine Songs," after Skovoroda's own collection of verse, pledging its proceeds to the reconstruction. UNESCO committed funds for emergency conservation, the regional government added its own, and in Kharkiv Oblast a public campaign called "301 True Friend of Skovoroda" set out to gather the money to save his home. While the physical museum heals, the institution has done something its wandering namesake might have appreciated: it launched online tours, letting the philosopher's ideas keep traveling even as his house stands quiet and scaffolded, waiting to welcome visitors again.