Independence Monument

A bronze woman in an embroidered dress stands 61 metres up, at the top of a slender white marble column, holding out a branch of kalyna — the red-berried viburnum that runs through Ukrainian folk song. She is Berehynia, and since 2001 she has marked the centre of Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the square at the heart of Kyiv. Where she stands, a granite Lenin stood until 1991.

By day the marble reads almost white against the sky; after dark the column is floodlit and the gilded leaves in her hands catch the light. It is the shape people picture when they picture Kyiv.

From a Lenin plinth to Berehynia

From 1977 the square carried a very different monument: a Soviet ensemble for the sixtieth anniversary of the October Revolution, with a red granite Lenin nearly nine metres tall and bronze figures of a worker, a peasant and a sailor ranged in front of him. This was October Revolution Square then, and the Lenin was its fixed point.

Within weeks of Ukraine's declaration of independence on 24 August 1991, the ensemble came down and the square was renamed Maidan Nezalezhnosti — Independence Square. What to put in its place took most of a decade to settle; the column with Berehynia was finally built for the tenth anniversary of independence, and President Leonid Kuchma unveiled it on 23 August 2001.

Berehynia and the kalyna branch

The figure is Berehynia, in Ukrainian folk tradition a protective female spirit, guardian of home and kin; some read her instead as an Oranta, the sheltering Madonna of the old churches. She wears embroidered national dress, her arms raised, lifting the branch toward the sky.

The branch is kalyna, guelder-rose, and in Ukrainian culture it stands for beauty, continuity and memory — one of the oldest images in the country's songs and folklore. There is a human story behind the figure, too: the model for Berehynia was the sculptor's own daughter, the artist Christina Katrakis. A national symbol, then, with one real face inside it.

The column, up close

Sources put the total height at about 61 metres — a few say 62 — which makes the column one of the taller things in the low-rise centre of Kyiv. The shaft is faced in white Italian marble, the reason it looks so pale, and it rises from a pedestal shaped as a small pavilion in the Ukrainian Baroque manner, a design usually traced to the Zaborovsky Gate at St Sophia.

The bronze figure on top weighs around twenty tonnes, and a spiral staircase runs up inside the shaft. In sunlight the detail gives itself away: the kalyna branch, the embroidery and the ribbons are picked out in gilding, so the figure seems to flicker gold when the light is right.

The still point of the square

Officially it is a monument in the middle of a square. In practice it is the point the whole of Maidan is read from — where people arrange to meet, where crowds gather on public holidays, the silhouette that lands in the frame whenever a photograph means to say Kyiv.

At the turning points of the country's recent history, the ground around the column has filled with hundreds of thousands of people. For many Ukrainians it carries that weight as much as it carries any celebration, and it is hard to stand in front of it and see only a landmark.

Getting there

The monument could hardly be easier to find. The metro station Maidan Nezalezhnosti opens straight onto the square — ride the escalator up and you surface a few steps from the column — while Khreshchatyk station is about 250 metres off, the two interchanging underground. Come twice if you can: by day for the marble, the carving and the gilding, and again after dark, when the lit column holds Berehynia over the square in a warm gold light.

Around the monument

Khreshchatyk, Kyiv's main street, begins at the monument's feet and is closed to traffic at weekends, given over to walkers — reason enough to use the column as the start of an afternoon in the centre. Set off in any direction and it stays in view behind you for a long while, a white marker at your back.