Who are the Guardians of Kyiv?

Since the old times it was believed that a human or an animal stone face on a building is a guardian against evil. These faces are called, in architects’ terms, the mascarons.

We went on a mission to explore, perhaps, all the streets of Kyiv, Ukraine, and as a result have made a huge collection of city’s mascarons. Moreover, we included Atlases, caryatids, and various bas-reliefs that we found around the city to our collection. Anything that had at least one face of “living” creature.

We have then made 6 collection categories which you can see below::

About

Women and girls

Beautiful muses of Kyiv

Collection

Why we created this collection?

Or the sad story of Kyiv mascarons

These couple of hundreds of hours that we spent searching and photographing, processing and organizing this huge archive of guardians (over 2000 photos), we could have spent on a couple of TV shows.

But, seeing how Kyiv is merciless to its history, we decided to become the guardians of Kyiv mascarons ourselves and try to save them at least in photographs.

By the way, some of the mascarons that we managed to photograph no longer exist – in some cases old houses were demolished, on others the valuable stucco molding fell apart without timely repair.

Why

Map

Map with our collection

Select a building you want to explore on the map. The “card” will open with the information about it, containing photographs of its guardians, as well as the house itself.

We hope that this map will help the guides who are seeking for new routes, tourists and all the lovers of our city.

The buildings marked with purple are the crème de la crème of Kyiv’s architecture and our collection.

Open map in Google Maps

About us

We do not like to talk about ourselves, but our strong belief is that every project or brand should have a human face behind it. Well, hello, we are these faces – Artem and Andrei.

We started our project back in 2010, with paper map and two cameras, strolling around the streets of Kyiv, taking photographs of every house with at least the smallest mascarons on it.