Zelensky signals the priceless cultural heritage that is at stake in war
In 1903, an architect by the name of Vladislav Gorodetsky put the finishing touches on a luxurious apartment building in the centre of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. To say that the building is unusual would be a vast understatement.
Gorodetsky – alternately known in English as Wladyslaw Horodecki – was a Polish-born architect dubbed “the Gaudi of Ukraine”. His namesake building fuses Beaux-Arts and Art Nouveau styles with a roofline and facade bearing a truly bizarre menagerie of grotesqueries: rows of frogs patrol the roofline, an elephant bulges from the building’s skin, heads of deer and rhinoceros emerge from atop Corinthian columns. And, on the roof, mermaids ride writhing fish.
As arts writer and editor John Pancake once wrote of Gorodetsky House in a 2010 Wall Street Journal dispatch, this was a structure created by “a man who hated the dull, the safe, the easy”.
It therefore could not be more apropos that the building has emerged as an architectural backdrop to one of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s urgent social media dispatches.
On the third day of the war in Ukraine, as Russian troops unleashed their attack on the country and rumours swirled that Zelensky might be evacuated from the country, the Ukrainian leader stood before Gorodetsky House and declared: “I am here. We are not laying down our arms. We will defend our state.”
He could be nowhere else. Gorodetsky House exists only in Kyiv.
In employing the building as a symbolic backdrop, Zelensky also seemed to be pointing to the cultural heritage that is at stake.
The destruction of cultural patrimony is a way of eliminating a culture’s narratives.
And Gorodetsky House offers a particularly compelling one. Completed in 1903, the building began life as a ritzy apartment building – and among its dwellers was its flamboyant architect. According to Pancake, Gorodetsky was “a bon vivant, ladies man, crack shot, big-game hunter, watercolourist, jewellery designer and lover of aeroplanes”.
According to legend, much of which may very well may have been self-invented, the architect liked to motor around town in his car – reportedly one of the first in Kyiv – in the company of a monkey. Death caught up with him in Tehran, Iran, where Gorodetsky got himself a commission designing railway buildings for the Shah.
Today, a statue to the architect – shown drinking coffee and reading a book about hunting – inhabits a well-to-do shopping arcade on Khreschatyk Street in Kyiv.
His best-known building, Gorodetsky House, has been an unlikely survivor of 20th century turmoil. After the Russian revolution in 1917, its grand flats were chopped up and turned into communal dwellings. And the neighbourhood that surrounds it saw the rise of self-serious Sovietstyle government buildings redolent of bureaucrats and Neoclassicism (such as the Ukrainian Presidential Administration Building, which sits just across the street).
During the second world war, Gorodetsky House changed hands repeatedly. After the war, it was turned into a medical clinic for Communist Party brass.
After a needed renovation in 2004, the House with Chimeras, as Gorodetsky House is also known (in reference to the architectural term describing gargoyle-style decorations on a facade), was transformed into an official government building. This fanciful, rather unreal structure is now used for diplomatic gatherings.
In Zelensky’s hands, this ebullient building has become a symbol of ebullient defiance, a fitting backdrop to an ideal of leadership embodied by the Ukrainian president which, in the words of The Atlantic’s Tom McTague, is becoming a rarity in the cynical West – a figure who expresses an “unembarrassed, defiant belief in a cause”.