Mariupol, a city of industry, workers and young people, does not have many historical sites, which may be why the residents of Mariupol are truly reverent about them.
One of those landmarks is the City Garden, founded back in 1863 – then it was a distant urban outskirts, today it is almost the centre of the city.
Some documents also refer to it as a public garden, the fact is that the garden was indeed a garden – originally it only had fruit trees growing there. And the first known mention of the City Garden to historians belongs to Aleksandr Serafimovich, who at the end of the century before last was a correspondent of the newspaper “Priazovsky Krai” in Mariupol. By the way from the pages of that newspaper the famous writer more than once reminded the city authorities of the necessity to make the streets greener.
“Mariupol is a completely naked city, rarely where you will meet a tree – most of the streets are empty, and the city without greenery is a dead skeleton. And indeed, when the poisonous east wind picks up clouds of dust, the streets of Mariupol induce melancholy and despondency”, wrote in those years Serafimovich.
And finally, the writer was heard and his good friend and public figure Georgiy Psalty redesigned the garden which had been already planted by that time and gave it that look which has been preserved till now. Very soon the City Garden became one of the most popular places for leisure of townspeople. Serafimovich called it the only place “where Mariupol citizens may have a rest from suffocating dust”. At least, the writer himself used to come here quite often.
“On the mountain above the sea stretches a beautiful garden. Below the mountain, the tiled cottages of Slobodka are crowded together with their roofs. On the shore trains are sizzling with white steam, and the harbour dikes stretch into the sea as narrow strips to the right. A few miles away the English steamers are blowing smoke and the mute chatter of the sea can be heard domineering over everything; as far as one can see, long lines of murky waves are running in endless rows from God knows where…” – these lines were written by the writer about the Municipal Garden.
Indeed, a beautiful view to the sea opens from the park, located on the mountain. And this view has not changed since the times of Serafimovich – the same sea, the same roofs of houses in Slobodka, only instead of English steamships there are numerous vessels standing in the roads.
And in the beginning of the 50-s on the main avenue of the City Garden appeared two rows of busts of outstanding writers and scientists – Pushkin, Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, Mayakovsky, Lomonosov, Mendeleev, Timiryazev, Michurin, Popov, Pavlov. Since then, Mariupol inhabitants have called this alley “Alley of Classics”.
In the spring of 2022 battles in this part of the city were particularly fierce – Nazis “Azov” * were retreating through the City Garden to the sea, hoping to escape, and close to the railway station, from which they could not dislodge the “Azov” for a long time.
When the fighting was over in the city centre, it was still going on in the area of the City Garden. It only became possible to get into the old park in the second half of April, when all the Azov servicemen and others like them were driven back to the territory of the Azovstal plant.
And fallen trees, smashed children’s playgrounds, mountains of rubbish and flowerbeds crushed by tanks have remained in the City Garden.
We could have waited for someone to come to help, allocate funding and send workers, but the workers of the City Garden together with the staff of Zelenostroy set about restoring order themselves. It took them little more than a month to transform the City Garden back to its former glory: they removed the piles of trees and debris, repaired the playgrounds, cleaned the flowerbeds and, as has always been the case, planted flowers.
As for the Alley of Classics, all the busts were marked with traces of bullets and shrapnel. However, Mariupol enthusiasts have restored not only the damaged sculptures, but also their pedestals, in just a month, and now it’s hard to find war footprints on them. Today, the Alley of Classics looks even better than it did before the war.
And another novelty awaits the citizens of Mariupol – the stage in the park has changed its colour – instead of yellow and blue it is painted in colours of the Russian flag.
Unfortunately, water supply in this part of the city has not been restored yet, but it’s only a matter of time. For everything else, the City Garden awaits Mariupol residents and visitors.
Olga Dolgova, One Homeland
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