Odesa decides to hold public hearings to select tombstones for memorial to the fallen

The Odesa City Military Administration and the City Council decided to organize and set a date for public hearings within 30 days to finalize the selection of tombstones to be installed at the memorial to honor those killed in the war with Russia.

As Iryna Orlyanska, co-founder of the Family of Angels of Light NGO, told Intent, the discussion was tense.

"The meeting lasted four hours and we almost lost our voices there because it looked like a bazaar where we were shouting at each other, but in the end we forced the city authorities to agree to hold public hearings on the headstones because they insisted that hearings were not needed. They insisted on dark monuments. The previous government and I had already reached some decisions, and the new government came in and tried to cancel everything. We want to make sure that we have an individual memorial, exclusive to Odesa," she said.

The meeting also approved tasks for improving four models - two crosses and two wave steles, which respectively took first and second place in the surveys conducted last year and in early 2026. The meeting also approved the stones for the tombstones - light granite in various stone processing options.

The third survey was conducted from January 13 to 31, 2026. The material of the tombstones was discussed. 326 families voted, 89% of them chose light granite. As for the type of tombstone, 344 families voted. They chose to discuss the cross and wave.

In total, there are 524 families of the fallen in Odesa who should have participated in the survey, because their relatives found their final resting place in the three sectors of military burials at the Western Odesa Cemetery and are discussed in the context of the project.

In her turn, Alla Bekh, Deputy Acting Head of the Odesa City Council, conducted the voting, the terms of which had been previously discussed with representatives of all four public organizations of the families of the victims.

"According to the results of the voting, two of the 12 samples provided were selected by an overwhelming majority of the families of the victims. One representative from each family of the deceased could take part in the voting. It was solely the families' choice," she said.

In August 2025, the then-mayor of Odesa , Hennadii Trukhanov, instructed the Land and Cadastral Bureau to conduct an aerial survey of the site for further planning and ordering a memorial project in honor of the citizens who died in the war with Russia. The concept of the future memorial, developed by architect David Pishchev in close cooperation with the families of the military, was also presented.

Prior to that, a roundtable discussion was held in Odesa on the standards for the design of military graves from the Russian-Ukrainian war. Participants discussed the unification of headstones, symbolism, and design of memorials to preserve historical memory and national identity.

And in April 2025, the Family of Angels of Light NGO proposed to the Odesa City Council and representatives of religious denominations to create an honorary military memorial burial site at the Western Cemetery in Odesa.

Кирило Бойко