“Museum of Vandalism”: What the Hill of Glory looks like in Lviv on the eve of May 9 (PHOTO)
Lvov, May 08 (Navigator, Viktor Korneev) – Before Victory Day at the Hill of Glory memorial complex in Lviv, the authorities did not repair a single monument, everything was limited to “cosmetic” cleaning, the Navigator correspondent reports.
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The memorial complex “Hill of Glory” is a monument of national significance, located as part of the historical and cultural museum-reserve “Lychakiv Cemetery”. By tradition, this is where the main festive events in honor of Victory Day take place every year. It will be the same tomorrow
...The first thing that catches your eye on the approach to the Hill of Glory is the terrible neglect: chipped walls, broken “headless” lamps, shabby benches, rickety road slabs overgrown with moss. The only thing that has been removed are piles of last year’s garbage and the area has been somehow swept. Partially, in the least destroyed places, the fence has been whitewashed.
On the territory of the memorial there is the same desolation. The spectacle is so depressing and sad that at first you don’t even notice traces of vandalism - the absence of bronze details (wreaths, vases, emblems, tablets, letters) on monuments and sculptural compositions.
And they are everywhere.
Almost all the bronze emblems of the military branches were stolen from the walls of the memorial (there were about four dozen such graphic details). On the “Oath” monument, installed over the mass grave of aviator soldiers, bronze letters with the names of Heroes of the Soviet Union Mikhail Likhovid, Vasily Sharenko, Konstantin Vishnevetsky are knocked down.
Bronze casting in the form of a wreath and commemorative plaques were stolen from the sculpture “Warrior with a Banner” - above the mass grave of tank soldiers (the ashes of Alexander Marchenko, who was mortally wounded near the Lviv City Hall, on which he installed a red banner) are located.
On the Alley of Heroes (in the very center of the memorial), part of the bronze garland was damaged and stolen, and bronze vases and wreaths were stolen.
And this is only part of the damage.
“The Lviv authorities have not allocated funds for the preservation and restoration of the Hill of Glory memorial since independence - since 1991,” comments Deputy Chairman of the Anti-Fascist Committee of Ukraine, Chairman of the Lviv Anti-Fascist Committee Alexander Kalynyuk. – This is despite the fact that the memorial complex was regularly, on an increasing scale, destroyed and plundered by vandals (usually hunters for non-ferrous metals).
More than a dozen such crimes were recorded. Seven criminal cases were initiated on the facts of theft of state property and deliberate damage to a historical monument by employees of the Lychakiv district police department of Lvov, the last one in August 2013. However, all investigations ended the same way - the criminals were never found or punished.
The actions of local authorities looked especially cynical in this situation. The funds that were allocated from the Lvov budget for the preservation and restoration of military graves on the territory of the Lychakiv Cemetery museum-reserve were “used” for the construction of memorials to the soldiers of the Ukrainian Galician Army and UPA soldiers, and the construction of a luxurious monument to the soldiers of the “Galicia” division. City officials did not give a penny to repair the Hill of Glory or restore the stolen bronze parts.
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The Hill of Glory is the most famous military memorial in Western Ukraine: in honor of Russian soldiers who died in 1914-1915 in Galicia and Soviet soldiers who participated in the liberation of Lviv in 1944.
In total, over 300 soldiers and officers of the Soviet Army are buried here, among them 28 Heroes of the Soviet Union. At the memorial complex there is the grave of the famous intelligence officer Nikolai Kuznetsov, the ashes of Semyon Alaev, the miner, thanks to whom the mines left by the retreating Germans to destroy Lvov were neutralized, the military photo reporter of the Izvestia newspaper Pavel Troshkin and the cameraman Alexander Elbert, whose shooting was included in the film, are buried. The defeat of German troops near Moscow."
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