The village’s ‘Memory Map’ — vanished buildings and landscapes

The most vivid local memories concern the Church of the Holy Spirit in the village of Dobrovillia, which stood on the site of today’s park between the kindergarten and the starostat office. Built at the landlord’s expense, the church had massive walls, high steps and five domes, drawing worshippers from the whole district. The priests’ red-brick house stood on the “chaharivka” (now Parkova street) — later the village council worked there, and today it houses a pharmacy. Beside the church stood a watch-house where, after the church was closed, salt was sold. And behind the school, where an underground shelter is now being built, lay the church cemetery — several remains were found during construction.

Locals recall that when the church was closed in 1929, its last priest, Father Luka, secretly held an Easter service, gave people communion, and baked and blessed Easter cakes — for which the Cheka soon took him away. They also remember the holy fool Mylka, who always sat by the church and to whom people came for advice and predictions. Around 1930 the church was dismantled, and its bricks went to build the machine-tractor station, the club and the shop, and to pave a stretch of the road from Dobrovillia to the village of Berestove. Residents note that many church icons were thrown into the local well, and little crosses have repeatedly been found on the site of the former church.

Until the early twentieth century a number of manor estates stood across the Bliznyuky region — important centres of economic life where local people worked. In Dobrovillia stood the well-known estate of squire Sumarokov, beside the Panskyi (Lord’s) pond. It was a large two-storey house with adjoining farm buildings, a pond and a garden. The pond was man-made, fed by spring water, lined with oak boards, tiled at the men’s and women’s piers, with a small bridge linking the manor to the garden — and a dedicated worker who cleaned the pond from a boat. A large orchard of apple and pear trees stretched beside the pond, its centrepiece a stone baba which, as the stories go, children tipped into the water. The place is also linked to the legend of the lord’s French wife buried in the garden. Sumarokov also kept an estate in the village of Yakovivka — a large building with five rooms, an adjoining brickworks and a cellar. After the revolution the manor building served as a school, and was later dismantled for local housing.

In Dobrovillia people also remember the estate of squire Krasnov at the foot of the hill, and the estate of squire Bykov beyond today’s Shevchenko street, across the Opalykha river. The latter survived the longest, serving as a children’s home after the Second World War.

Memories of estates survive in other villages of the region too. Beyond Hannivka lay the estate of squire Pukalo with its garden, pond, farm buildings and stables — the surrounding lands are still known as the “Pukalo fields”. Local lore has it that during the revolution the squire ordered part of his valuables hidden in a well, the pond and the marsh, which gave rise to countless legends of buried treasure and the finds of “black archaeologists”. In Hannivka itself, by the Halych pond, stood the estate of squire Halych, of which only folk place-names and the memories of the elders now remain.

Among the region’s other landmark buildings are the hospital and the school in Dobrovillia, built in 1904 and 1914 at Sumarokov’s expense. Local memories also repeatedly mention Jewish cemeteries that ended up in someone’s yard. In the garden of the Rudenko family, who bought their homestead from the Antonenkos, low grey crosses inscribed in Hebrew were found, and in the neighbouring garden of Larysa Ivanivna Rudenko — obelisks with Jewish inscriptions. Most likely this area was once a single Jewish cemetery, later divided into house plots.

Thus the vanished buildings and landscapes of the Bliznyuky region are not merely lost objects but part of a history that lives on in people’s memories, local lore and old photographs.