Mother Ukraine Monument — war memorial
spoilt.exile · CC BY-SA 2.0

Mother Ukraine Monument

  • 2 min read
  • 50.426° N 30.563° E

Interesting facts

  • In the 1950s the same hillside was considered for twin statues of Lenin and Stalin, each nearly 200 metres tall, but they were never built.
  • The 16-metre sword in the figure's right hand weighs about nine tonnes on its own.
  • Vuchetich's early version of the face was based on the Ukrainian painter Nina Danyleiko.
  • Vasyl Borodai used the sculptor Halyna Kalchenko, daughter of a head of the Soviet Ukrainian government, as the model for the finished figure.
  • The statue opened a year later than planned, and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev attended the inauguration ceremony on 9 May 1981.
  • The new trident on the shield was designed by Oleksiy Perhamenshchyk with the help of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko.
  • According to Kyiv's urban planning agency, about 85 percent of some 800,000 citizens consulted in 2022 backed replacing the Soviet emblem with the trident.
  • The trident is made of stainless steel with the same composition as the rest of the statue, so the old and new metal match.
  • The monument has featured on postage stamps twice: on a Soviet issue of 1984 and on a Ukrainian stamp of 2023.
  • It served as a pit stop on the reality show The Amazing Race 10 and appears in a scene of the novel World War Z.

Why it is worth it

On the hills of Pechersk above the Dnipro, next to the monasteries of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, a stainless-steel woman raises a sword and a shield over the city. The statue itself is 62 metres tall; with its base the monument reaches 102 metres and weighs some 560 tonnes. The sword is 16 metres long, the shield 13 by 8 metres. It was opened on Victory Day, 9 May 1981, as the Soviet Union's tribute to the Second World War, and under the name Mother Motherland it joined a family of colossal war memorials across the USSR.

The first design came from Yevgeny Vuchetich, the sculptor of The Motherland Calls in Volgograd and the Soviet soldier carrying a child in East Berlin. After his death in 1974 the project passed to Vasyl Borodai and was reworked so thoroughly that, it is said, only the eyes and eyebrows of the original face survived. The sword was made shorter than planned; a persistent story claims this was so its tip would not rise above the Lavra's cross, but the documented reason was aerodynamic, found in wind-tunnel tests. According to Borodai's grandson, the sculptor had wanted her to hold a palm branch of peace.

The base houses the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War. Its hall of memory carries marble plaques with the carved names of more than 11,600 soldiers and over 200 home-front workers honoured with the highest Soviet titles Flower shows are held on the slope below.

In 2023 the Soviet hammer and sickle was cut from the shield and replaced by the Ukrainian trident, designed by the sculptor Oleksiy Perhamenshchyk; the work was finished in time for Independence Day on 24 August, and the monument has since been widely known as Mother Ukraine. Seen from the river or from across the city at dusk, the steel figure catches the light like no other shape on Kyiv's skyline.

Getting there

The monument stands in the Pechersk district of Kyiv, about 2 km from the Klov area near the city centre. Kyiv's main international airport, Boryspil (KBP), lies roughly 30 km east of the centre. From the city, take the metro to Arsenalna and walk about 20–30 minutes.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Ukraine 15The Most Striking War Memorials 15The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments 173

From the encyclopaedia

Mother Ukraine is a monumental Soviet-era statue in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. The sculpture is a part of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War. In 2023, the Soviet heraldry was removed from the monument's shield and replaced with Ukraine's coat of arms, the tryzub, in response to the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

50.42650, 30.56311per Wikidata