Editor’s Note: The Kyiv Post’s weekly Euro 2012 page looks forward to the soccer tournament that Ukraine will co-host with Poland from June 8 to July 1. We will cover information for fans, visitors and people who live in Ukraine, including travel tips, interviews, coverage of the teams competing and information on preparations for the championship.
DONETSK – Monuments to Vladimir Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders dot the streets and squares of this east Ukrainian city, contrasting sharply with the city’s jewel – the modern Donbass Arena.
Donetsk is full of competing vibes – Soviet and modern – which will be highlighted this summer as the city of miners and steelmakers hosts five games at the Euro 2012 tournament, including a semifinal.
Originally named for an enterprising Welsh businessman, Donetsk is at the industrial heart of the country, packed with steel mills and mines. The locals take pride in the proletarian heritage of this city.
John Hughes is the Welsh industrialist who is credited with transforming a tiny village into a major industrial center. That process started in 1869. The city was called Yuzovka in his memory, a name it carried until 1924.
In the heart of the city, Ukraine’s fifth-largest with one million inhabitants, stands the country’s biggest statue to Lenin. Rising 42 meters above the central Lenin Square, it lies opposite the luxurious Donbass Palace Hotel, owned by Ukraine’s richest man Rinat Akhmetov.
After experiencing a tough time in the 1990s, when it was the center of gang wars for control over industrial enterprises, Donetsk has modernized quickly in recent years, largely under the influence of Akhmetov.
The $400 million stadium, financed by Akhmetov, is the first in Eastern Europe to be built to UEFA’s five-star standard. It is home to Shakhtar Donetsk, the country’s most successful football club in recent years, which is also owned by Akhmetov.
Apart from football matches, the championship brought a few new roads to the city, as well as new hotels, an international airport terminal and a new runway. The authorities are promising a sparkling, newly upgraded railway station, too.
Among all this upgraded infrastructure are monuments that highlight the city’s past.
Artyoma Street is the place for a new visitor to start a tour. The central street of Donetsk, which boasts both modern and Soviet-era architecture, clusters of shops and eateries of all breeds, the street is dotted with statues to the city’s heroes.
The street is named for Communist Fyodor Sergeyev, whose revolutionary nickname was Artyom. His six-meter tall statue here will remind you of the glory days of Donetsk as the Soviet powerhouse.
Next to the Olympic Stadium you will find a statue of the living legend, Soviet and Ukrainian pole-vaulter Serhiy Bubka, the Olympic champion who was born in Donbass, the region of eastern Ukraine presided over by the city of Donetsk. The statue has swallows on the athlete’s legs, symbolizing his ability to fly high.
Bubka is now an adviser to the president and the head of a bank. His modern roles are very descriptive of the evolution of the Donetsk regional elite since Ukraine gained independence in 1991.
Since President Viktor Yanukovych – a native of the region and former governor – took office in 2010, a number of top government posts have been filled by Donetsk natives.
The city administration will greet you with an exact copy of the famous Czar Canon, which is more than five meters long. In a country where rulers are notoriously detached from the people whose taxes pay their salaries, the presence of an ancient canon on the officials’ doorstep looks symbolic.
Particularly so if you know that the original canon lives behind the Kremlin walls. Russia is still the nation many in eastern Ukraine look up to. Russian is the dominant language spoken in the industrial east, formerly a major destination for heavy industry, mining and metallurgy specialists from the whole Soviet Union.
Historian Yevhen Yasenov says the residents are not ashamed of the communist monuments still richly decorating the city. “The city just caught [the tail end] of the czarist epoch, but really flourished in the Soviet Union,” he explains.
Donetsk is home to the world’s perhaps most famous plant forged out of steel, the intricate Mertsalov Palm. Originally created for an exhibition in 1896 by Aleksei Mertsalov, a local blacksmith, out of a single rail, it represented the skills and power of the heavy industry in Czarist Russia.
Donetsk lost the original palm to a museum in St. Petersburg, but two copies of the plant stand in front of the local government building on Pushkin Street, and in front of Expodonbass exhibition center on 189V Chelyuskintsev Street. Other copies that have come to represent Donetsk are scattered around Ukraine and the globe. The Donetsk Oblast crest also features the palm.
More iron art objects can be found behind the Donetsk City Administration on Universitetskaya Street. A unique Park of Iron Statues is located there, and the annual international festival of blacksmiths takes place there, too. Among about 150 objects, the park features a copy of the UEFA trophy won by Shakhtar in 2009.
“Fans adore having photos taken in front of the replica trophy,” says Viktor Burduk, one of the festival’s founders.
Football fans will get a glimpse of what his festival is like, because blacksmiths will be working during the UEFA championship, he says.
Historian Yasenov says that, as modern-day football fans are not the same rowdy types they once were, he hopes they will prefer museums to drinking and fighting.
Kyiv Post staff writer Denis Rafalsky can be reached at [email protected]
