Donetsk Region. Cultural Heritage in Ruins. An SOS

In the Donetsk region, as throughout Ukraine, historic buildings that are famous landmarks of towns and villages are collapsing, falling into decay, and burning down. The destruction of the historical and cultural layer of this industrial region has been going on for decades, and since the early 1990s the number of neglected sites among the pre-revolutionary buildings has increased considerably. Some of the houses have owners, but they are not concerned about the state of their priceless property. Not all the historic buildings that make up the architectural face of this industrial land, or are simply important for preserving memory, are under municipal protection. But even those that have been granted the status of monuments enjoy no special privileges, and protected status has added nothing for these former masterpieces. Genuine pearls, whose history spans more than a hundred years, have potential and could be the adornment of towns and objects on tourist routes. If these works of architecture, these industrial monuments, were saved and, with the help of investors, turned into museums, offices, shops, and art galleries, they would bring both aesthetic pleasure and practical benefit.

Prelesne, Donetsk region. The abandoned Bantysh estate

Closed Schools. Abandoned Temples of Learning

For thousands of school leavers, after a many-year marathon of dictations and tests, the last bell has sounded as a leitmotif. Saying goodbye to their school and their teachers, yesterday's pupils have stepped, with dreams and hopes, onto the new starting stage of adult life. However each person's path in life turns out, through all the rises and falls, achievements and failures, we are all bound by an unbreakable invisible thread to our school, our teachers, our friends. The wise word of a teacher is always with us, and their blessing before the long road. At different moments in life we return in our thoughts for an instant to our own school, climb the school porch and enter the classroom where there was so much that was important and essential. Reunions of classmates and teachers are often held within the walls of the alma mater, and a wonderful immersion into the times of happy childhood and youth takes place. 

Not all former pupils have anywhere to come back to, because their schools are not only closed but destroyed by mismanagement and indifference.

 

Mykolaivka, Donetsk region. An abandoned school

Mykolaivka. Who needs a zemstvo school?

We all come from childhood, and we are inevitably bound to it through school. In 2018 the building of the former zemstvo school of the village of Mykolaivka, in the Pokrovsk district of Donetsk region, was granted the status of cultural and historical heritage of Ukraine.

The zemstvo school. Mykolaivka, Pokrovsk district, Donetsk region.