Kyiv City Council looks for the owners of dilapidated monuments

Kyiv City Council has created a committee to search for the owners of historical buildings that are gradually decaying. There is a well-known corruption scheme, in which a person rents or buys a historical or architectural monument, and signs it out of the realty heritage list – without proper repair and restoration the building deteriorates, and then offices, hotels or trading centers appear on its place. To counter that scheme, the Council members decided to look for the owner of such premises and even created the basic list of 26 houses subject to immediate protection.

Viktoria Kustova, member of the council who had initiated the creating of this committee, said in an interview to a municipal press: “The people have exploited the scheme by signing a protection contract and promising to reconstruct buildings – while all they’ve been doing is ruining them. We found out that some of the buildings have no official owners – for instance, the Hryhorii Svitlytsky museum at 30 Dihtiarna St.; an old estate at 6 Tropinina St.; a grand building at 12/14 Bohdan Khmelnytsky St.; a one-storey building at 23/3 Borychiv Tik; the powder storage of the Kyiv Fortress at 7-B Lavrska St. Among the ancient buildings on the verge of destruction there is also a Hospital No. 16 building. The Hospital management is indifferent to the fate of the premises, despite the fact that it has a reconstruction plan fully developed.”

Kyiv historians have their own similar lists with dozens of addresses. But what should one do with such a list? Iryna Nevmerzhytska, lawyer and activist of “Andriivsky-Peizazhna Initiative” NGO, explains that there are no obligations under the law for the owner to keep a bought or rented monument in an appropriate state. That’s why creating such lists is futile – nothing will happen unless the law is updated. The important thing is that there was a group in the Ministry of Culture, working on such amendments to the Law “On Protection of Cultural Heritage” – precisely in regard of saving the monuments that are in the private ownership.

“There was even an intention to implement a foreign practice of signing a contract when giving up the premises to the private owner offering a tax reduction in return for the obligation to provide for the reconstruction. But at the moment we have no such legal binding, and that’s why I don’t know what can be done even if we manage to find the owners,” explains Nevmerzhytska.

The law amendment is still being discussed. Earlier, Kustova said in an interview to Khreshchatyk newspaper, that in order to save the monuments we need to run an inventory check, create a complex protection plan, and find the investors. So far, only the committee was created.