Description of the attraction
Everyone who enters the Sophia Square in Kiev cannot fail to notice another masterpiece located there. This is a monument to the most famous hetman of Ukraine, who raised the people to the liberation war, Bohdan Khmelnitsky.
For the first time, the idea of installing such a monument appeared in the 19th century, more precisely, in 1868. The project was proposed by the most eminent sculptor of that century - Mikhail Mikeshin. The original composition was supposed to include many more characters, symbolizing both the oppressors of the Ukrainian people and the people themselves. So, under the hooves of the hetman's horse, the corpse of a Jesuit, covered with a torn Polish flag, was supposed to lie, behind the horse was the figure of a Polish nobleman falling from a cliff, a little lower should be the figure of a murdered Jewish tenant, holding a dead grip on church property. The granite rock on which it was planned to place the monument was supposed to stand on a powerful pedestal decorated with bas-reliefs on three sides. In front, the composition was complemented by the figures of the singing kobzar and his listeners. In 1870, permission was obtained to raise funds for the monument, but since things were going hard, and the composition itself was recognized as not politically correct, it was decided to confine itself to the sculpture of one hetman. To a large extent, the construction of the monument was helped by the Maritime Department, which donated more than one and a half tons of decommissioned ship copper, from which in 1879 a statue of the hetman was cast at one of the St. Petersburg factories.
Since there was no money for the pedestal, for many years the monument stood on a pedestal made of ordinary bricks. And only in 1888, on the occasion of the celebration of the 900th anniversary of the baptism of Kievan Rus, a worthy pedestal appeared at the monument, on which to this day the figure of a truly extraordinary personality stands.
