Lavra and St. Sophia’s Cathedral are left in the top status, the fate of Carpathian churches and Chersonesus is still up in the air

The UNESCO World Heritage Com­mittee made a decision to leave Kyiv Cave Monastery (Kyiv Pe­chersk Lavra) and the National San­c­tuary “Sophia of Kyiv” on the World Heritage List. The Com­mit­tee’s session is taking place in South Africa and will last till June 27.

In the middle of April this year, an expert commission from this organization visited Ukraine to monitor the si­tuation with buffer zones around the national reserves “Sophia of Kyiv” and Kyiv Cave Monastery. It has been the third visit since 2010. That is why Kyiv officials started to worry: accor­ding to Dmytro Nikulshyn, head of the Kyiv City Council standing commission for culture and tourism, there was a real threat of exclusion of “Sophia of Kyiv” and Lav­ra  from the UNESCO World Heri­tage List. The Day wrote that since the UNESCO Paris Confe­rence in 2010, Kyiv had received a lot of signals to stop decreasing the buffer zone around the monuments and freeze any construction pro­jects there, but Kyiv autho­rities would not react. First UNESCO representatives only proposed their observations and re­com­mendations for Ukraine, but this time a report was sent to the 2013 UNESCO conference in South Africa.

And now the regular sitting of the Committee on World Heritage ended with a positive decision. “I would like to congratulate you and the Ukrainian community on the fact that this issue has been solved today and will never be raised again,” said minister of culture Leonid Novo­khat­ko. He also noted that representatives of Germany and Switzerland criticized Ukraine during the voting at the committee’s session. But we were supported by Russia, Japan, Algeria, and other countries. Novo­khat­ko emphasized that during the previous sessions of UNESCO, the matter of exclusion of Uk­rainian cultural heritage monuments was never raised, and after this voting it was finally removed from the agenda.

Meanwhile the members of the Ukrainian delegation, including Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Ukraine to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the Kingdom of Cambodia Oleksii Shovkoplias, Kyiv chief architect Serhii Tselovalnyk, and director ge­neral of the National Preserve of Tauric Chersonesus Serhii Zhunko, expect po­si­tive results in the voting on the possibi­lity of including such Ukrainian monuments as “The Ancient City of Tauric Chersonesus and its Chora (5th century BC – 14th century AD)” and “Wooden Churches of the Car­pathian Region of Ukraine and Po­land” to the World He­ri­tage List. The World Heritage Committee might consider this issue as well.