Kyiv · UA

Memorial Bykivnia

On the eastern edge of Kyiv, deep in the pines of Bykivnia Forest along Brovarskyi Avenue, lies one of the most moving places in Ukraine: Bykivnia Graves, the largest burial site of victims of Stalinist political repressions on the country's territory. Between 1937 and 1941 the Soviet NKVD secretly drove trucks of the shot through the night to a fenced "special plot" here and buried them in unmarked mass graves. Historians estimate that tens of thousands of people—30,000 to 35,000 residents of Kyiv and the region, along with more than 3,500 foreign citizens—were laid here, and researchers have so far recovered the names of over 18,500 individuals sentenced and executed in Kyiv. For decades the truth was buried with the dead, and the forest's real purpose was denied or pinned on the Nazis. It was only after independence that the site was officially recognised, and in the 1990s a memorial complex began to take shape among the trees. Today Bykivnia is a National Historical-Memorial Reserve and a place of quiet, open-air remembrance—part cemetery, part sculpture walk, part museum—where the names of the murdered are inscribed in stone and the Polish and Ukrainian dead lie in a shared ground.