Mariinsky Park

Mariinsky Park is a magnificent park in the center of Kiev, not far from the Mariinsky Palace and the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. The park was laid out in 1874 under the leadership of the gardener A. G. Nedzelsky.

Previously, there was a palace square on the site of the Mariinsky Park, where military parades were held. The park covers an area of almost 9 hectares, where you can walk in the shade of old trees. There are about 80 varieties of trees here, of which the most interesting are Schwedler maples, ailanthus, Japanese sophora, chestnuts, Amur velvets.

There are many interesting monuments in the Mariinsky Park, among them the monument to the heroes of the October Uprising, dedicated to the participants of the armed uprising of 1917. Then, after the uprising, soldiers and workers were buried in a mass grave at the entrance to the park. A monument to them was erected in 1927, during the Great Patriotic War it was destroyed, but it was restored in 1948. During the mass unrest in 2014, the monument was destroyed. The monument was a pedestal with a red granite bowl. In January 1918, there was another uprising during which 750 people were killed, they were also buried in the park, and in 1967 a monument was erected to them in the form of a bronze worker raising the banner of the revolution. The height of the pedestal is 2.5 meters, and the sculpture of the worker is 4 meters. In 1948, a monument to Army General Nikolai Fedorovich Vatutin, who rose from a Red Army soldier to army general heading the Voronezh, Southwestern and 1st Ukrainian Fronts, was unveiled in Mariinsky Park. The general was seriously wounded in 1944 during an ambush by an UPA sabotage group and died of blood poisoning a few months later.

One of the main attractions of the park is the Bridge of Lovers, where it is customary to declare love and jump off it in case of a negative response. They also leave colored ribbons and locks with their names on the bridge.