OPINION: Appeal to UNESCO About Saving Odesa’s Cultural Heritage Sparks Controversy

An open letter to UNESCO, signed by almost 150 (mostly Ukrainian) artists and intellectuals, seeking help in deferring decisions about Odesa’s World Heritage until the end of the war, has sparked controversy in Ukrainian social and mass media. Signatories have been accused of opposing decolonization and upholding Russian narratives. 

The letter, sent on Oct. 21, appeals to Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, which recognized Odesa’s historic center as a World Heritage Site last year, to ask President Volodymyr Zelensky to halt decisions about almost 100 street names and 19 historic monuments that have been earmarked for removal.

They note that decisions, announced in late July by Oleh Kiper, the Kyiv-appointed Head of the Regional Military Administration, were reached with no public consultations and the residents of Odesa only learned about them as a fait accompli.

The legal justification for these top-down decisions is a new Ukrainian law “On the condemnation and prohibition of propaganda of Russian imperial policy in Ukraine and decolonization of toponymy,” which mandates the “liquidation of symbols of Russian imperial politics to protect Ukraine’s cultural and informational space.”

Many Odesans reacted negatively to the decisions, with popular Telegram channel polls showing 76% to 88% opposition to the renaming of streets. A petition, signed by hundreds this summer, was sent to the Head of Regional Military Administration, with copies circulated to the Ministry of Culture, Institute of National Memory and the President’s office, to no avail.

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Odesa, Ukraine’s main Black Sea port city, has a rich and distinctive historical and cultural heritage, where Italian and French influences mingle with Russian and Jewish elements that gave the city its character in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Under Russian tsarist and Soviet rule, Ukrainian identity remained muted but has been gradually reaffirmed since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, and more vigorously since Russia launched its war against Ukraine in 2014.

While many of the figures to be erased from Odesa’s cityscape are Soviet-era non-entities, whose absence will upset few, this initiative also stands to liquidate a whole host of Odesa’s writers, from Ilf and Petrov to Vera Inber, Valentin Kataev, Yuri Olesha, four-time Nobel nominee Konstantin Paustovsky, Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin and the city’s most famous writer, Isaac Babel. Both the street named after Babel and his statue, built with funds raised by the city residents, are slated to be removed.

It is not easy to see the sense in which Ilf and Petrov, who mocked the Soviets, or Bunin, who condemned them in his Cursed Days, or Babel, who perished in Stalin’s purges, can be treated as “symbols of Russian imperial politics,” from which we need to “protect Ukraine’s cultural and informational space.”

The letter was signed by an array of artists, actors, and historians, curators, poets and anthropologists, musicians, novelists, filmmakers and photographers, not only from Odesa, but also from Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Lviv.

Among its signatories are also currently serving soldiers and veterans of the Russo-Ukrainian war, like Dmytro Dokunov, who took part in liberating Kherson and is now building a rehab for veterans, or Alexandr Onishchenko, a theatre director who volunteered for the front in the first days of the war, or Serhiy Bochechka, a scholar of Ukrainian literature, now serving as a Captain of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, or Oleksandr Babich, historian of Odesa now also on the front.

A number of eminent figures from across the world have also signed in support. Some, like the two-time Grammy Award winner Alex Sino, is from Odesa. Others, like Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg or author of the bestselling novel The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal, trace their roots to it. Others still, like British journalist and novelist Julian Evans, have penned books about the city they have come to love.

The breadth and force of Odesa’s diaspora is testimony to the city’s “diverse, multi-ethnic, multicultural, cosmopolitan” history and sense of self, which UNESCO’s inscription celebrates, and which captivates authors and scholars, the world over. It is precisely this cosmopolitanism that Ukraine’s new culture politics now puts at risk.

The letter itself demonstrates that, despite nearly three years of Russia’s total war and the suspension of many democratic rights, Ukrainian citizens remain staunch democrats, unafraid to express dissent, unwilling to accept top-down decisions. This is the Ukraine we are fighting for – a country not only independent from Russia, but also fundamentally different from it.

Who should or should not be treated as a “symbol of Russian imperial politics” should not be judged by the language in which the figures in question wrote – Russian or Ukrainian – but the views they upheld. 

Babel’s writings make many fall in love with Odesa, just as Kafka, who wrote in German, the language of a state that once invaded the Czech Republic, draws many to Prague. Why is Babel to be excluded from public memory in Odesa, while Prague prides itself on statues of Kafka?

Odesa’s UNESCO letter is not only about the city’s heritage. It is also about Ukraine’s future. The country now faces a choice of two very different futures. It can choose an inclusive model of political nationhood, which celebrates the country’s multi-regional, multi-ethnic, polyglot history and social landscape, within a unifying European democratic Ukrainian state, or it can opt for an archaic and divisive ethnonationalist model closer to the Russian.

As Thomas de Waal, one of the letter’s signatories, wrote last year, Odesa has already made its Ukrainian choice, having placed faith in Ukraine as the guarantor of its free, European future. Odesa does not need to be “Ukrainianized.” It is already Ukrainian.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the authors’ own and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.