There is much more to any city than sightseeing routes. We walk past remarkable historical buildings almost every day and don’t even imagine what happened there scores or hundreds of years ago. Throughout its history, Kyiv has seen a lot of interesting and significant sites coming about. Unfortunately, many of them have now been reduced to ruins.

Few people know the history of the building that hides under thick trees behind the fence on the territory of the Institute of Pediatrics on Kyiv’s Ovrutska Street.

A typical example of late 19th-century Neo-Renaissance estates, this villa consists of a mansion, an apartment building and a park.

In 1889, a plot of land in the Kmytiv Yar area was acquired by an assistant pharmacist, Oktavian Bilskyi, who immediately got down to building a wooden mansion. In 1893 the facade was cladded with bricks. After the pharmacist came to own a pharmacy at 17, Kostiantynivska Street in Kyiv’s historical district of Podil, he bought a neighbouring plot from an official named Bulychenko. There Bilskyi built an apartment house with two five-room flats designed by architect Mykola Kazanskyi. It was also planned to make a park on the territory of the estate.

In 1922 though the estate was nationalized by the Bolsheviks. For some time the park was open to the public, but soon was classified as a restricted access facility. From 1934 until his execution in 1937, the head of the penal authorities in Ukraine, one of the organizers of the Holodomor famine, Vsevolod Balytskyi, lived in the former apartment building. He directed the relocation of the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic from Kharkiv to Kyiv. The People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs had ponds, bridges, a fountain, and gazebos arranged in the estate, sculptures mounted in the park, the house reconstructed, and new mahogany furniture ordered. The works were financed from the “special fund” against fictitious reports. In total, he spent about a million roubles on the makeover of the site.

After the shooting of Balytsky, on the eve of the German-Soviet war, the estate was made into a camp for children of NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) officers.
After the liberation of Kyiv from the Nazis, the estate served as a place of residence for the party leaders of the Ukrainian republic. In 1943-1949, Nikita Khrushchev, chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR and first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, lived in the second building. He moved here after the shelling of his apartment at 9, Pavlivska Street. The former mansion, which was smaller in size, housed servants and security guards.

Kyiv guides claim that Khrushchev had a zoo with peacocks and a bear set up for him in the park.
In 1963 Petro Shelest, the communist leader of Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, settled in the estate. He advocated parity in economic relations between the Soviet Union center and the republic. This position seemed too “nationalistic” to the Soviet leadership. In 1972, on the eve of US President Richard Nixon’s visit to Kyiv, Shelest was removed from office.

Under Volodymyr Shcherbytskyi, a new Head of Ukraine’s Communist Party Central Committee, who moved to a new residence in Mezhyhirya near Kyiv, the estate was transferred to the Institute of Pediatrics, Obstetrics and Gynecology. Since then, the man-sions have been occupied by the institute’s administration and the Ukrainian Family Planning Centre.
By the order of the Main Department for the Protection of Cultural Heritage 10 / 38-11 of June 25, 2011, the buildings were included in the register of architectural monuments and urban planning of local significance.

Currently, the estate is in decline: garden sculptures have collapsed over time, the pool, gazebos, small bridges dilapidated, the source of the river Hlybochytsia has long been shallow. The park has centuries-old plane trees, spruces and other greenery. Today it is hard to believe that it was once a paradise. In a few more years the park may disappear altogether.
The administration of the institute has no funds to take care of the territory and maintain park sculptures and old mansions.

Our objective is to conserve Ukraine’s historical legacy for future generations. The charity foundation seeks to restore the architectural monument in its entirety and preserve it for the future.

With your donation you take part in preserving the irreplaceable cultural heritage of Ukraine that would otherwise be lost.
We guarantee the efficient and appropriate use of your donations. The employees of the foundation work voluntarily and ensure that every donation goes into the project it is intended for.

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BILSKY’S MANOR

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