Kyiv street art - a thousand years of writing on walls

Kyiv · from the eleventh century to the present

Street art in Kyiv is older than the name for it. On the walls of St Sophia's Cathedral, built in the eleventh century, researchers have found nearly 7,500 graffiti from the eleventh century to the early eighteenth: prayers, names, dates and drawings scratched into the plaster and the frescoes.

Many begin the same way: "Lord, help your servant…". One, dated 20 February 1054, records the "repose of our tsar" - Yaroslav the Wise. Above a drawing of a duck stand the words "Petro wrote this" and the year 1076. In the seventeenth century a pilgrim left a line that still reads plainly: "Hryhorii Didovych was here, on pilgrimage to St Sophia."

The message has not changed much. Ukrainian cities began to be painted in the 1990s. Tags - a writer's name, put up again and again in marker and spray paint - say, in the words of the writer and artist Vova Vorotniov, "Vasya was here" rather than "Yankee go home".

The large paintings came later. Volodymyr Manzhos says that he and his partner in the duo Interesni Kazki began painting murals in Ukraine in 2008, the first to do so. The wave rose in 2014, after the Revolution of Dignity and the start of Russia's war against Ukraine: murals appeared on Kyiv's streets in large numbers, by local artists and by artists invited from abroad. Projects such as CityArt and Art United Us set out to paint the city's grey buildings in colour; Geo Leros, who led CityArt, said the flights and the paint were paid for by patrons, not by the city. One map listed about 140 murals in 2016; the district administrations counted 159 in 2020.

Some of those walls are in the photographs here. In 2016 the Canadian artist Emmanuel Jarus painted himself with a bicycle on a house beside the Kyiv velodrome, which opened in 1913. On Bulvarno-Kudriavska Street, Jake Aikman, a painter based in Cape Town, spent nine days in July 2017 on a three-storey Black Sea, his first wall; the paint is flaking now, and a small red ship that no account of the mural mentions sits in the waves. In Podil, the Brazilian artist Nunca painted a Cossack whose face is being painted by dark-skinned hands, standing for Brazil's Indigenous peoples: one figure for two cultures.

Not everyone wanted them. The house Nunca painted, 6-A Spaska Street, built in 1910-1911, is a listed architectural monument; when he began work, in November 2015, people opposed to it called the police. In November 2023 Kyiv City Council stopped new murals until there was a procedure for approving them. The procedure adopted in July 2024 rules out historic buildings and advertising, and sends each design to a commission of five city representatives and six independent experts. Murals are also lost the ordinary way: a French artist's woman in a boat was hidden by a new building next door, and the monkey with a drum that Interesni Kazki painted in 2008 is losing its plaster.

Much of what is on Kyiv's walls is smaller. A grey door painted by Sestry Feldman, twin sisters from Dnipro and two of the best-known street artists in Kyiv: a golden cup marked ERROR, a toy brick on top, the globe below. And tile: from late 2018 an anonymous group, Pomme de boue, fixed more than 300 mosaics of coloured ceramic tile to Kyiv's walls, many of them in Podil; over three years the pieces grew from 5-10 cm across to 40-50 cm. By the spring of 2019 someone was already prising some off, leaving holes in the walls. "We are interested in the city and in fighting gloom," the group said. After the full-scale Russian invasion it moved to France. Posters over posters, stickers over stickers, tags over tags.

And words, written straight onto walls and asphalt. «Київ місто сад» - Kyiv, garden city - in green spray paint. On a pillar in Podil, in English and signed by another city: "To Podil: Dont sell your soul like we did. Love, Berlin." On the Rybalskyi cable-stayed bridge of 1963, closed for years and since partly taken down, someone wrote «Kyiv one love» on the road.

Russia's war has been on the walls since 2014, when fences and bridges in many parts of Ukraine were painted blue and yellow. On what was Lev Tolstoy Street, above two basement windows, the words «Любов є закон» - love is law - were in Russian before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. In 2022 they were not painted out but de-russified: blue paint covers the extra letters, and what is left reads in Ukrainian. In March 2023 the street was renamed too, after Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi.

In November 2022 Banksy confirmed seven works in Ukraine. Two are in Kyiv: children on a seesaw made of an anti-tank hedgehog, by the Alley of the Heavenly Hundred, and a missile launcher drawn around a crude drawing that was already on a wall of Velyka Zhytomyrska Street. On the same street, a framed print of it hangs on a painted ground-floor front. Handwritten sheets pasted on a hoarding say «Дякую» and «Сумую»: thank you, I miss you.

Centuries on, Hryhorii Didovych's line can still be read. Most of what Kyiv writes on its walls today will not last as long: tags are painted over, posters torn down, mosaics prised off, murals flake or disappear behind new buildings. A photograph keeps the moment; the walls go on changing.

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Sources: V. Kornienko, interview, Radio Svoboda, 2021; Khmarochos, 2020 and 2022; Bird in Flight, 2023; DW, 2016; Radio Svoboda, 2016 and 2020; Kyiv Post, 2023; Colossal and Brooklyn Street Art, 2017; Wikipedia: "Murals of Kyiv", "6-A Spaska Street", "Sestry Feldman", "Rybalskyi cable-stayed bridge"; Kyiv City Council, 2023; Kyiv city portal, 2023; LB.ua, 2024; Glavcom, 2019; Dymchuk Gallery, 2022; The Art Newspaper and Kyiv Independent, 2022. Photographs: MYT'.