House with Chimaeras, Kyiv
Elephants, rhinos, mermaids and frogs in grey concrete – Horodecki’s hunting-dream apartment house, the most fantastical facade of Eastern Europe.
At a glance
- Type
- Apartment house, now presidential ceremonial residence
- Period
- 1901-1903
- Style
- Art Nouveau (fantastic naturalism)
- Location
- Bankova Street, Kyiv, Ukraine
- Coordinates
- 50.4444, 30.5267
- Architect
- Wladyslaw Horodecki; sculpture Emilio Sala
Overview
The House with Chimaeras drips with concrete fauna – elephant heads whose trunks once spouted rainwater, rhinoceroses, pythons, mermaids riding dolphins, and frogs scaling the gables – the apartment house architect Wladyslaw Horodecki, big-game hunter and dandy of Polish Kyiv, built for himself in 1903 partly to advertise the new material, cement, sculpted by Italian master Emilio Sala.
History
Horodecki – Kyiv’s Gaudi, author of the city’s karaite kenesa and St Nicholas catholic cathedral – lost the house to debts from his safaris and ended his days building for the Shah of Persia. The Soviet era subdivided then hospitalized the building; restoration in 2004 made it the ceremonial residence where Ukraine’s president receives credentials, facing the presidential office across Bankova street – the address the world’s cameras found after 2022.
Architecture and Design
Built on a cliff site engineers refused, the house presents three storeys to Bankova and six to the slope below, on concrete piles – a structural demonstration wrapped in Sala’s bestiary inside and out: antler chandelier motifs, hunting friezes, catfish coiling the stair. Art Nouveau’s nature-worship here turns taxidermic and dreamlike.
Cultural significance
The house is Kyiv’s most beloved architectural eccentric and a symbol of the city’s belle-epoque cosmopolitanism – Polish architect, Italian sculptor, Ukrainian capital. Its wartime resilience made the chimaeras minor icons of national defiance.
Visiting today
The exterior can be viewed from Bankova’s pedestrian zone subject to security conditions; occasional guided tours enter when the ceremonial calendar allows. Check the situation in Kyiv before travel.
Getting there
Khreshchatyk metro is a short walk; the house stands above the Ivan Franko theatre square in the government quarter.
Sources and resources
Find it on the map
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