Odesa City Hall informs when forgotten Mykolaiv will be added to the "Alley of Indestructible Cities"

A column commemorating Mykolaiv will be added to the "Alley of Unbreakable Cities," an installation officially opened in Odesa on July 3, after it arrives in Mykolaiv.

This was reported by the press service of the Odesa City Council.

"The exhibition "Alley of Unbreakable Cities" was officially opened on Exchange Square with the participation of representatives of the Dobrobat volunteer construction battalion, an exhibition that has already visited Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Zaporizhzhia. The exhibition will run in Odesa until July 20. After that, the exposition will travel to Mykolaiv, where a new column dedicated to unbreakable Mykolaiv will be installed," the municipality said.

"The Alley of Unbroken Cities" consists of columns made from the fragments of Russian missiles that hit Ukrainian homes. The number of notches on each column are traces of missile attacks on each city.

However, when the columns were lined up on Exchange Square on January 25 and many Odesa residents and visitors saw them, they noticed that there was no mention of Mykolaiv among the pedestals, and this city is unofficially called the "shield of Odesa" after it managed to stop the Russian offensive on the outskirts of the city, which, after the occupation of Kherson, moved towards Odesa region.

On June 25, journalist Zoya Kazanzhi cited Deputy Mayor of Odesa Hanna Pozdnyakova as saying that a column mentioning Mykolaiv would be added to the exhibition in the near future.

"An exhibition-installation called "Alley of Unbreakable Cities" was brought to Odesa. On Exchange Square, right in front of the city council, 15 columns were installed - similar to the 15 cities of Ukraine that were the first to experience the horror of Russian missile attacks. With the assistance of the Deputy Mayor of Odesa, Hanna Pozdnyakova, this important and poignant exhibition took place. Hanna wrote about it. And suddenly it turned out that there was no Mykolaiv among the columns with the names of cities. Before that, the exhibition had been in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Zaporizhzhia. And no one noticed the absence of Mykolaiv! But in Odesa, they did. The creators of the sculptures sent a request to an official government agency to obtain statistics on the number of missile strikes on Ukrainian cities in 2022. They received the data and realized their plan based on this terrible statistics. But Odesa is not to blame. When we talked about this, Anna Pozdnyakova said: I'm ready to pay for everything myself, because I understand how much it hurts Mykolaiv residents! The organizers responded. The Mykolaiv column will be there soon," the journalist wrote at the time.

The author of the exhibition is sculptor Jan-Pawel Roman. The 15 columns symbolize the cities of Ukraine. The pedestals are decorated with fragments of missiles and shells found during the reconstruction.

Кирило Бойко