The square on the square corresponds to the fortress esplanade. Lenin. The oldest part of the fortress – Horodyshche or Stara Poltava – is located on a high mountain and is now a prominent landscape dominant in the panorama of the city.
04.08.2011
In the field of architectural studies, this inventory is marked by the preparation of the History of Ukrainian Architecture, which should be published in the near future, the formation and publication of registers and various directories of architectural monuments, lists of historic cities and more.
In this context, accounting for lost architectural heritage is a task that has been on the agenda for many decades. Back in the 1920s, G. Lukomsky wrote about the barbaric shelling of Kiev monuments by the Bolsheviks during the so-called civil war. However, then neither he nor his colleagues could have dreamed in a nightmare what the Bolshevik government would do with the most significant monuments of Kyiv during the 1930s.
Petro Savitsky was the first to speak out loud about the destructive bacchanalia in 1937 (!). Excerpts from his work were once published in the magazine “Sights of Ukraine: History and Culture”. On the basis of archival materials taken from Kyiv to the West during the Second World War by architect O. Povstenko, the American architect of Ukrainian origin Tit Gevrik in 1982 organized an exhibition “Lost Architectural Monuments of Kyiv” at the Ukrainian Museum in New York and published an illustrated catalog of the same name. … Subsequently, this catalog in Ukraine was republished in an abbreviated version of the magazine “Sights of Ukraine”. In the early 1990s, T. Gevryk came to Ukraine several times, worked for a long time in various archives, in the Reference and Information Fund NDITIAM. He aimed to expand his previous work and prepare a book “Lost architectural monuments of Ukraine.” At the end of his research, before leaving for America, he confessed in a personal conversation to the author of this investigation, who still did not fully imagine the enormous scale of loss of Ukraine’s architectural heritage during the twentieth century, and therefore feels that he can not understand this topic.
In 1995-2001, we tried to gather together and at least to some extent analyze materials about the lost objects of architectural heritage of both Kyiv and the whole of Ukraine. Our work does not claim to be complete. We generally doubt the practical possibility of creating a complete catalog of lost architectural objects due to the lack of relevant bibliographic and iconographic materials; after all, in Ukraine for a long historical period not only monuments but also libraries and archives were destroyed.
We pose the problem of accounting for lost objects of architectural heritage, rather than lost architectural monuments. This is due to the fact that according to current legislation and our professional beliefs, a monument is considered only an object of architectural heritage, which is included in the relevant state register or list (list) of monuments. The communist regime did destroy many prominent buildings that were included in the official lists of architectural monuments (St. Michael’s Golden-Domed and St. Nicholas Military Cathedrals in Kyiv, Trinity Cathedral in Hlukhiv, etc.).
However, most of the destroyed objects were not included in any lists of monuments, and some were lost even when the very concept of architectural monuments was not formed (in the early nineteenth century). But all the objects that we selected in the course of our study would be architectural monuments of the highest value category – monuments of national importance – if preserved to this day.
We are far from believing that the descriptions, photographs, drawings and drawings we have collected can give an adequate idea of the relevant architectural objects. After all, architecture is a spatial art. It operates with volume and space.
Therefore, planar images cannot convey the relationship of masses, volumes and spaces in a real architectural environment – be it a city, street, square, manor or interior. As a result, even experts can not get a true and accurate idea of the lost architectural object, if they have never seen it in nature. Therefore, any reconstructions and reproductions, no matter how powerful their source and methodological base, remain purely hypothetical and conditional.
So in the future we will have to be satisfied with the pale shadows of the former greatness and believe in the words of those researchers (IE Grabar) who saw, for example, St. Nicholas Military Cathedral in Kiev before the destruction and testified that here for the first time in Ukraine was demonstrated there can be a force of aesthetic influence of the lapidary white plane of the wall bordered by semicolumns and crowned by eaves.
Nevertheless, in the context of the above-mentioned “large inventory”, it seems to us extremely necessary to gather together even these pale shadows of architectural genius, because it significantly complements our ideas about the development of architecture in Ukraine and throughout Central and Eastern Europe.
So, the time has come for us to count our losses and comprehend them. In order for these calculations to make any sense, we must first clearly define which object of architectural heritage we can consider lost. How complete should its destruction be?
For us, this question is not of theoretical but of purely practical interest. Because when the question of restoring lost monuments arose at the state level in Ukraine in 1996, various bizarre proposals immediately appeared, including the restoration of those monuments that were not lost or destroyed at all. This has long been a well-known in formal logic classic situation of using inaccurate names.
Therefore, there was an urgent need to find a clear, logically consistent definition: what is a lost building (monument). We proposed our definition, which after some discussions eventually became generally accepted and was formally legalized by a resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine in 1999. It is formulated as follows: a structure is considered lost, more than 50 percent of the ground part of which is lost.
Compiling a catalog of lost objects of architectural heritage, we have developed a method of selecting these objects on three principles.
First, each object must have a high degree of historical and cultural value, namely – to meet at least one of the following criteria:
to make a significant impact on the development of culture, architecture, urban planning, art over a long historical period; to be directly connected with historical events, development of ideas, outstanding persons who had a decisive influence on the course of national history, development of culture and art; to a masterpiece of creative genius, to be a stage work of outstanding architects or other artists; to be a unique work of a lost culture or artistic style.
This first principle means that if preserved, an object that meets these criteria would be included in the State Register of Immovable Monuments of Ukraine as an architectural monument of national importance. In other words, without these objects it is impossible to imagine the history of Ukrainian architecture.
Secondly, the object must be, if not completely destroyed, then at least ideas for a narrative essay destroyed, ie more than 50 percent of the ground part of it must be lost.
Third, we must have a clear idea of what the object looked like. And for this, there must be an appropriate source base in the form of old photographs, drawings, engravings, lithographs, dimensional or design drawings, detailed descriptions, research materials, and so on.
It is on the basis of these principles that we, having conducted the relevant research, selected 396 objects for the Directory of Lost Objects of Architectural Heritage formed by us. We would like to note that we deliberately did not include such objects as the Assumption Cathedral in Krylos near Halych or ancient Russian churches in Pereyaslav, the Church of the Annunciation in Chernihiv, the remains of which were excavated by Academician B. Rybakov, or churches and basilicas of Chersonesos. All these objects are characterized by a lack of appropriate source base. We do not know and will never know exactly what they looked like.
And hypothetical reconstructions of various specialists on the basis of descriptions or interpretations of the remains of foundations are too unreliable basis for historical and architectural science.
Similarly, but on a different basis, we ignore such architectural structures as some unscrupulous works of Kiev architects E. Ermakov and V. Nikolaev of the late nineteenth – early twentieth centuries, which in terms of architectural and artistic level could not claim the status of a monument. …
We have also included in the Handbook about a dozen objects that are still listed in the state lists as architectural monuments of national importance (castles in Halych and Korca, a townhouse in Lyubech, etc.). These are monuments either completely destroyed in recent years, or those in a state of ruin, when more than 50% of the land volume is lost. Some of these monuments were included in 1999 in the Program of Restoration of Outstanding Monuments of History and Culture of Ukraine and at the end of 2001 were successfully restored (Vladimir Cathedral in Chersonesos).
Once again we consider it necessary to emphasize: the original catalog concluded by us thus does not claim completeness. This is due to the fact that not all the lost attractions are known to us, or studied sufficiently. Thus, the author seems to drive himself into a dead end. After all, our current knowledge about the lost objects of architectural heritage is incomplete and fragmentary.
Not all regions have been sufficiently studied (the worst in this sense we know the southern and western regions, further study of which remains a challenge for the future). Not all lost objects have been identified, and the source base, especially the archives, is clearly insufficiently studied to date. Now no one will be able to predict how many buildings or their complexes may be included in the complete catalog of lost architectural heritage sites, if such is ever created. In the end, in our deep conviction, such a catalog cannot, in principle, be complete, because the process of cognition is infinite.