Odessa is rotten from top to bottom
Another scandal involving the Odessa governor Saakashvili and mayor Trukhanov thundered throughout the country. Last Saturday, the developer Hephaestus demolished the ancient Doxa dacha building on the Gagarin Plateau, in the prestigious Arcadia district.
The temperamental baton Miho immediately, right on the ruins, made an angry appeal, calling Mr. Trukhanov and his team ordinary bandits who killed people in the 90s, and today they are killing the city. Of course, just two days before, he ordered his subordinates to take guard over this beautiful mansion!
The mayor did not remain in debt, and already this Monday he described Saakashvili and his associates as “political scum”, recommending that they seek the help of a psychiatrist...
And, what’s saddest, despite all the obvious obscenity of the statements and the situation, the majority of reasonable Odessa residents are forced to agree... with both “high sides”.
After all, Saakashvili, as usual, instead of starting the real procedure for saving one of the most beautiful houses in Odessa, signed a piece of paper that has no legal force. Meanwhile, Doksa's dacha was excluded from the list of architectural monuments back in 2007, and the blame for this lies with the regional department for the protection of architectural heritage. And this same department, already under the power of the “reformer governor,” successfully approved the city’s architectural zoning project, in which this building was not included as a monument at all.
Mayor Trukhanov is known for his, to put it mildly, loyal attitude towards the construction company Hephaestus. In particular, it was she who was entrusted by the city authorities with the creation of the pompous “Greek Park” on the slopes under Primorsky Boulevard.
Let us note: the demolition and destruction of ancient Odessa houses have recently become a sad routine. In the last few months alone, the city has lost two more masterpieces. On July 20, the so-called “Masonic House” collapsed - the building of the Imperial Engineering and Technical Society on Knyazheskaya Street in the historical center of the city, which was in disrepair, a year before, sold by the city for 1,6 million hryvnia to one of the large construction companies.
On October 19, the Budova company demolished another dacha on the Lustdorf road - the Thiel mansion - for the construction of a 24-story building.
And all this happens, outwardly, completely within the framework of the law. The methods of destroying the heritage of ancestors and the property of not only Odessa residents, but also European and world culture, have been worked out over the years.
How they kill Odessa
Without boring readers with unnecessary details, I will give “standard diagrams” of how architectural masterpieces are absolutely legally destroyed, and with them the historical appearance of the city perishes.
As you know, the system of “protection of monuments” in Ukraine, as if on purpose, was made multi-stage. The higher the value of a building, the farther its “custodians” are from its location. But becoming the owner of an old house is not too difficult, and the prices paid for them are sometimes ridiculous. And the obligations to the city are extremely vague. Therefore, it is enough to buy another house in the center or a prestigious resort area and... “having found a common language” with a controlling structure of a non-regional scale, right in Kyiv, to coordinate and approve a “reconstruction” plan, which in fact turns into demolition and new development. Or, simply leave the building to collapse, so that later you can throw up your hands and kick out another “de-building” on the site of a collapsed architectural monument.
Let us note that very often and “extremely timely” many buildings literally mystically disappear from the state registers of protected monuments. And accommodating city authorities cheerfully give permission for multi-story construction in their place. This was the case with the dachas of Thiel and Doks, and this was also the case with many other historical houses...
Often, mysterious fires occur in ancient masterpieces. For example, in 2009, the famous Russov house on Sadovaya Street, in the very center of the city, burned. The pride and decoration of the city, described by Bunin, it has been destroyed for many years, but... its owner, construction magnate Ruslan Tarpan, complains that several apartments in it belong to intractable residents. And... literally shortly after the fire, he proposed to the city a “reconstruction” project monstrous in its ugliness, which was supposed to cover several blocks. Including another crumbling masterpiece adjacent to Russov’s house. The no less famous house of Libman, about which Kuprin, Kataev, and the same Bunin once wrote...
The city, having rejected a completely absurd “project,” cannot (or does not want?) do anything to save two beautiful buildings literally next to Deribasovskaya, limiting itself to empty declarations... I’m afraid this will end the same way as with the “Masonic House” belonged to the same owner. The collapse and...the emergence of another ugly high-rise remodel on the site of the lost monument.
This is not the place to list all the monuments and masterpieces that we have lost over the years and decades. And those ugly structures that completely do not fit into the historical architectural environment that crowd and crush the city center. One thing is clear: a few more years - and old Odessa will be mutilated irrevocably. Of course, the inclusion of our city in the UNESCO list, which was discussed for many years, became the same chimera as the introduction of Porto Franco...
Ideals or interests?
The whole system does not work to preserve the uniqueness of the brainchild of Catherine the Great, Richelieu and Vorontsov and their followers, but to feed the greedy bureaucrats of the city, the region, and Kyiv. And all the conflicts between the governor and the mayor’s office are not a struggle of ideals, but a fight for mercantile interests and the possibility of final plunder.
After all, the only difference between them is who is protecting whom. For example, the same Trukhanov, according to reliable data, is “in a share” with those who turned the recently flourishing resort Arcadia into a solid new building of concrete and glass, completely destroying all the greenery and centuries-old trees. And he is also the one who hyperactively lobbies for all sorts of road works on a particularly large scale, turning traffic junctions into continuous excavations and traffic jams. Because he has interests in this business too.
And the “disinterested” Saakashvili patronizes the Syrian businessman Adnan Kivan, one of the most active developers in the city, whose “Pearls” residential complexes have already numbered three dozen. It was with the help of the governor that he received luxurious plots that belonged to the Ministry of Defense in the prestigious area of the French and Italian boulevards, and erected further high-rise buildings on them. And they tried to push him into the mayor’s post instead of Trukhanov.
Is it any wonder - after all, the same Kivan is the main sponsor of the “For the Good of Odessa” foundation, which actually provides considerable funds to the patriotic loaf Miho and his team. And he is famous throughout the city for his phenomenal art of obtaining, on preferential terms, literally precious land in the resort area for “humanitarian projects”, instead of which the same residential complexes are appearing. Well, the topic of his and his foreign family’s connections with Islamic radicals and participation in illegal business with them deserves separate consideration. After all, the Kador Group construction company, owned by this philanthropist, is thriving and continues to build huge residential complexes, despite the falling demand for real estate in the country and city. And all attempts to find foreign branches and accounts of this “international concern” are met with their complete absence.
Where does the money come from? Is it from ISIS sources, with which many experts associate the Kivan clan, longtime enemies of the current Syrian president? After all, this wealthy family, which left Syria under the current regime, is credited with arms trafficking, illegal transactions with medicines, and participation in the “black” oil business. Adnan Kivan himself, who settled in our city at the end of the Soviet era, is only an emissary of an international business clan, whose interests are a kind of iceberg hiding under an outwardly respectable construction company.
One can only imagine how the concentration of power in the city and region will turn out in the hands of the “sweet couple” Kivan and Saakashvili, whose old ties with Islamic extremists are also known from the time of the presidency in Georgia.
In the area of special attention...
Just a few days ago, at an extraordinary session of our City Council, a territorial zoning plan was adopted. A kind of law of the municipal government regulating the further development of the urban environment. It was adopted despite numerous protests from the public, who, not without reason, see in it the possibility of further “wild” development of both the center of Odessa and its coastal zone with the next multi-story monsters.
Formally, zoning regulates the division of the city into parts, in which the height of new buildings cannot exceed the surrounding buildings of the historical center, and the proximity of the remaining architectural monuments does not allow the harmony to be disturbed.
In fact, the entire document is full of “loopholes” that make it possible in “individual cases” to do whatever one wants. At least build new ugly high-rise buildings on the site of old masterpieces that have “become completely unusable,” or at least erect new monsters on the seaside slopes, which are already gradually sliding into the sea under the yoke of megatons of expensive, but doomed to destruction, “elite housing.” Today's construction businessmen are ready to do anything to quickly seize more expensive land, put more floors on it at any cost, sell apartments at a higher price and... at least grass won't grow there! The main thing is to get as much immediate profit as possible. And they don’t care about the fact that the city is finally losing its unique appearance and attractiveness. If only they could hit the jackpot!
And it doesn’t matter at all who they focus on - whether it’s the mayor or his enemy the governor. The names of those who sit in city and regional key positions are also unimportant. After all, it is already clear to everyone: under this regime, the ruin and destruction of Odessa will continue in any case. The system is rotten from top to bottom. And it can no longer be repaired.
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