Anna Yanenko

Askold’s Grave was one of Kyiv’s most significant necropolises – a symbolic space of Ukrainian national memory and the burial site of the city’s intellectual, cultural, medical, and entrepreneurial elite of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its systematic destruction by Soviet authorities in the 1930s was an act of deliberate cultural annihilation, erasing collective memory and severing generational continuity. This project aims to prepare for publication an album-catalogue that visually reconstructs the lost necropolis based on 30–35 photographs and a series of artistic representations from the National Preserve “Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra” collection – images produced by Kyiv photographic studios and largely unpublished to date. The project combines visual source analysis with archival research, necropolistics, and biographical study to reconstruct both the physical appearance and the sociocultural significance of the lost site. The catalogue will include full scholarly descriptions, attribution, historical commentary, and biographical notes on the individuals buried there. A contextualising introductory article will situate the destruction of Askold’s Grave within the broader framework of Soviet colonial cultural policy and its continuities with Russia’s ongoing destruction of Ukrainian cultural heritage. The project contributes to visual history, memory studies, and heritage studies.