Bureaucratic poltergeist

The Day has already reported that on New Year’s Eve demolition vehicles pulled up to the Kyiv Fortress, the world’s largest earth fortification, and razed three mid-19th-century buildings. Among them was a military telegraph, the only one that had preserved its original shape. The destruction of this particular structure is what caused the stir.

The architectural monuments were pulled down to make way for a new housing estate. An ad hoc commission convened by the Kyiv City Administration launched a probe into whether the builders’ action was lawful and published its preliminary conclusions a few days ago. As the bureaucrats learned, there was no telegraph to begin with.

“The structure at 24/16 Rybalska Street is not a cultural heritage monument,” said Vitalii Zhuravsky, deputy chairman of the Kyiv City Administration, “but it stands next to an architectural monument of national importance: tower No. 3 of the Kyiv Fortress, located at 22 Rybalska Street.” The commission also believes that the structures torn down by the builders were in fact service buildings. One of them, a former barracks, once belonged to the Ministry of Defense.

One of the reasons why the commission came to this conclusion was that the archives do not contain any photographs of the telegraph dated later than 2004. The bureaucrats also suggest asking Kyiv’s ex- mayor Oleksandr Omelchenko where the building has gone because it was the former Kyiv Council that decided to authorize the build-up of this area.

Viacheslav Kulinich, curator of the Kyiv Fortress Museum, is sure that asking the Ministry of Defense will be useless because ministerial documents list the architectural monuments as ordinary buildings. “This provides a legal opportunity to demolish, build up, and sell architectural monuments,” says Kulinich angrily. “The Ministry of Defense had no right to sell these structures because it was only leasing them; it didn’t own them.”

Still, the ministry’s involvement is not the main thing that surprises Kulinich. What alarms him is the fact that, according to the commission, the telegraph, which he saw on Dec. 28, disappeared back in 2004. “I clearly saw this telegraph house and I can testify to this in court,” the curator says. In reply, the members of the commission only explained that they rely on official documents, and since there was no photographic evidence, there was no telegraph.

Incidentally, as soon as the Kyiv Fortress vandalism hit the headlines, Ruslan Kukharenko, chief of the Kyiv City Administration’s Cultural Heritage Protection Department, visited the site. “The tsarist empire’s first military telegraph has been destroyed,” he told journalists. Kukharenko, official, who is also a commission member, has since rescinded his words on the grounds that when he came to the museum, the telegraph building had already been demolished. “I could have been mistaken, of course,” Kukharenko says. “How could I tell what kind of a building it had been?”

“The No. 5 fortress is part of a complex of other structures, including the telegraph house. Why are we talking about the latter? Because when workers were building it, they laid out the construction date in bricks,” Kulinich says, producing photographs showing that the date, 1887, may be clearly seen on the building’s facade. “And it never occurred to me to take a picture of the telegraph.”

Where the telegraph has gone and what should be done in this situation are questions with no easy answers. The commission has promised to make public the final results of its inquiry in the next few days. Yet even now it is possible to predict, on the basis of the preliminary conclusions, what kind of results they will be. The only hope for the museum staff is the Kyiv Prosecutor’s Office, which is already investigating the “museum case.”

Meanwhile, the commission claims that all the construction and renovation work near the Kyiv Fortress has been suspended. But according to Kulinich, excavators are continuing to dig at full blast — they only stopped this mayhem when journalists came to the scene. The Kyiv Fortress curator thinks the builders are trying to destroy the remaining evidence.

In order to begin construction near a historic site, builders are supposed to carry out archeological excavations in the area, which, of course, was not done in this case. “If we let the culprits get away with this incident, tomorrow we will be living among the buildings of a housing project,” Kulinich says. “There are plans to build four high-rises here — one with eighteen stories and three with twenty-five. They are more massive than the belfry of the Kyivan Cave Monastery. And this is only the beginning of mass-scale construction in Pechersk District.”

There are a lot of murky aspects to the Kyiv Fortress affair. Three 19th-century architectural monuments have mysteriously vanished like needles in a haystack. If one reflects on this state of affairs reasonably, even if it turns out that the real telegraph was pulled down several years ago and what was demolished recently was a disused military barracks, is it a good idea to disfigure such a historic place as Kyiv Fortress with another skyscraper?