Qualla: Mezhyhirya Residence

Mezhyhirya Residence: Introduction

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eugene Shutoff, CC BY 3.0. For years the fence kept everyone out. Five meters tall, it ran the entire perimeter of a vast estate on the banks of the Dnipro north of Kyiv, hiding whatever lay inside from a curious and skeptical public. Then, on 21 February 2014, President Viktor Yanukovych fled the country during the Revolution of Dignity, and the gates were suddenly open. Ordinary Ukrainians walked in and found a private world: a golf course, an ostrich farm, an automobile museum of exotic cars, man-made lakes, a helicopter pad, and a floating banquet hall shaped like a galleon. What had been rumor became, overnight, a place anyone could stand in and see. For the crowds who wandered its lawns that first weekend, the shock was less any single object than the sheer scale of it all, hidden for so long behind a wall.

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Image: Eugene Shutoff | CC BY 3.0

Mezhyhirya Residence: A Monastery, a Dacha, a Palace

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aleksandr Andreiko, CC BY-SA 2.0. The land had held very different dreams before. Until 1786 a monastery stood here, the Savior-Transfiguration, its founding traced back to the princely age of Kyiv, until Catherine the Great's edict dissolved it and, the story goes, had it burned. The poet Taras Shevchenko later ...

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Image: Aleksandr Andreiko | CC BY-SA 2.0

Mezhyhirya Residence: The House Called Honka

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aleksandr Andreiko, CC BY-SA 2.0. The centerpiece was a grand log building known as the club house, or simply object Honka, named for the Finnish company that manufactures such homes. Around it spread the trappings of extravagance: an equestrian club and shooting range, a yacht pier, a dog kennel, fountains, a sm...

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Image: Aleksandr Andreiko | CC BY-SA 2.0

Mezhyhirya Residence: The Museum of a Fugitive's Taste

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Raphaël Vinot, CC BY 2.0. When the estate returned to state ownership in 2014, Ukrainians did something pointed with it: they turned it into a museum, and left much of it as they found it. Activists occupied the log clubhouse in the days after the president fled, and journalists pulled bundles of waterlog...

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Image: Raphaël Vinot | CC BY 2.0