Decades of neglect have left Ukraine’s historical monuments in ruins.
In a bid to preserve the country’s decaying cultural heritage and attract more tourists, the government has allocated $72 million to restore 150 historical monuments within the next three years.
President Volodymyr Zelensky announced the launch of the so-called Big Restoration in February within the framework of his Big Construction program to fix infrastructure in the country.
It’s an ambitious program for Ukraine’s rich history, which counts over 15,500 registered monuments in major need of restoration. But the sum allocated might not be enough because monuments are expensive to restore.
The country also lacks the preservation experts to do the job thoroughly, which raises doubts over the announced deadline.
The state is considering different funding sources, including private-public partnerships with private companies to focus on the most attractive assets for tourists. But so far, there are no companies involved in the project.
Overall, it’s a positive first step to preserve Ukraine’s history, Kateryna Goncharova, an expert in architectural heritage preservation, told the Kyiv Post.
“It is the first time in many years a program defines cultural heritage as a resource for further growth, and not as a burden,” she said.
Expensive restoration
The Big Restoration will be funded from the national budget and is important for the future of historical restoration in Ukraine, according to Goncharova. The $72 million might not be much, but it’s still a positive sign.
“It goes further than simple promises,” she said.
Still, renovating objects might cost more than expected.
For example, the Pidhirtsi castle in Lviv Oblast in western Ukraine might cost up to $17 million despite its good appearance, Oleksandr Tkachenko, culture minister, said during an interview with TV channel TSN on April 14.
It’s already a quarter of the program’s budget — just for one monument.
Cultural heritage takes a broad range of resources to develop. It demands a lot of stakeholders and public-private partnerships, according to Goncharova. “The government itself can’t preserve what we have with its own funds,” she said.
And funds for culture are scarce. Ukraine’s draft budget for 2021 provides the Ministry of Culture with less than $1 billion to take care of cultural development.
From this budget, the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation taking care of buildings’ preservation will only receive $25 million.
For reference, in France, the Center of National Monument received 3 billion euros just to take care of national monuments across the country.
Competition
This is the first time that the government has defined historical monuments as a resource for economic growth, a move Goncharova described as a major shift in cultural policy.
The renovation work on some monuments already started, Tkachenko said in an interview to news agency Interfax-Ukraine in March. Renovations of the Oleskiv Castle in Lviv Oblast and the National Art Museum in Kyiv, as well as the second phase of the Holodomor memorial, are already in full swing, he said.
The full list of the 150 monuments to be restored will be announced at the end of April, after a selection conducted by a special committee composed of officials from the Ministry of Regional Development, the Economy Ministry and leading cultural preservation experts.
Starting March 3, local authorities had one month to submit the monuments they wanted to add to the list. Over the month, the committee received hundreds of applications from all the regions, including Lviv Oblast where no less than 31 monuments await approval.
Goncharova praised the idea of competition, because it engages local communities.
Such an initiative creates a proactive “bottom-up” approach where regions have to defend the right for their heritage to be protected, rather than be passive and complain about the government not giving them enough money to take care of their local historical sites.
“It shakes up the victim-like behavior of local cultural department and makes them fight for what they want to preserve,” she said.
Criteria
While the application is now closed, the jury will face a tough choice among hundreds of proposals, but the first monuments to undergo renovation will be chosen according to a few crucial requirements.
Among other criteria, they must be in an emergency condition, considered of national importance and have to be easily accessed by road to attract tourists.
For Goncharova, some of the selection criteria are problematic, because Ukraine’s poor road quality doesn’t allow access to most of the country’s historical sites.
“The quality of the roads leading to some sites excludes them from the list,” she said.
It also excludes underwater archaeological sites, which could be a good tourist attraction, archaeological and historical natural sites. This means that the 2,500-year-old sunken Ancient Greek ship discovered in 2018 on the coast of southern Mykolaiv Oblast, which is believed to be the oldest one of its kind found in the Black Sea, won’t be on the list.
For Goncharova, the 3-year deadline is unrealistic. Preservation takes a lot of time and effort, including researching the plans of the original monuments and designing them to last for years to come while fitting the original design.
This list of monuments and the deadline of the project will probably be extended to preserve Ukraine’s history, as Zelensky acknowledged when announcing the project.
“We have many historical monuments — it is simply impossible to restore all this in three, five or 10 years,” he said.
