17 August 2025
(A bust of Lesia Ukrainka in Dnipro. PHOTO: Wikipedia)
At its next meeting, the Executive Committee of the Odesa City Council plans to consider holding an open all-Ukrainian architectural competition for the best design proposal for the monument to Lesia Ukrainka in Odesa with the improvement of the surrounding area.
As noted in the draft decision of the executive committee, after the decision is made, the competition will begin on September 29, 2025, and end on January 30, 2026.
The competition is open to professional architects, sculptors or designers, students of architectural and construction higher education institutions, design organizations, teams of authors, specialists in the field of urban planning and architecture. The teams of authors may include specialists from other fields with experience in creating monumental art objects.
It is proposed to provide cash prizes to reward the authors of the best project proposals:
Also, incentive prizes totaling 35 thousand hryvnias, which may be distributed among the participants of the competition, including those who did not win the first, second, or third prize, by the jury's decision.
Larysa Kosach was born on February 25, 1871, in the town of Novohrad-Volynskyi (1795-2022), now Zvyagel, Zhytomyr region. Since childhood, her family called her Lesia. The poetess visited Odesa at least 18 times. She was treated here, stayed with the family of her friends the Komarovs, and wrote a cycle of poems "Journey to the Sea" and the story "Over the Sea." Her play "Blue Rose" was staged on the Odesa stage in 1903. In Odesa, there is a street named after Lesia Ukrainka in the Peresypskyi district, and in 2024, according to the order of the head of the Odesa Regional State Administration, Gagarin Avenue was renamed in her honor.
In total, the project stipulates that UAH 350 thousand should be allocated in the 2026 budget for the competition. The competition commission will include 12 people, only three of whom are not consensual: Ivan Liptuga, Director of the Department of International Cooperation, Culture and Marketing of the Odesa City Council, Nadiia Novikova, Acting Director of the Department of Architecture, Urban Development and Land Relations and Chief Architect of the city, and Yurii Chetakov, Executive Secretary of the competition, specialist of the Department of Analytics and Support for Control over the Use and Protection of Land of the Municipal Institution "Municipal Land Resources Service of the Odesa City Council" .
In July 2024, a park located at the intersection of Lesia Ukrainka Avenue and Fontanska Road was renamed after Lesia Ukrainka.
Кирило Бойко