Kyiv's Dacha Boom a Century Ago: How It Was (Photos)
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Kyiv went through a real dacha boom. City residents who escaped to their summer cottages grew exotic plants, listened to military bands and even performed in amateur theaters.
The trend sweeping the whole Russian Empire did not pass Kyiv by. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the villages surrounding the city began to change at a rapid pace. Kyivans seemed to have stepped out of Anton Chekhov's famous play The Cherry Orchard (1903): "Until now there were only gentry and peasants in the countryside, but now there are summer residents too. All towns, even the smallest, are now surrounded by dachas. And one can say that in twenty years the summer resident will multiply extraordinarily."
What drove Kyivans out of town was urbanization. Earlier in the 19th century, few people felt the urge to leave, because the city itself was full of blossoming gardens. But as the new century approached, Kyiv was changing too, becoming more and more "urban."
A major role was played by the redevelopment of Professor Mering's estate. It covered a huge area of 10 hectares in what is now the very center of the capital.
In 1895 the estate was bought by a housing construction company, and streets lined with apartment buildings were laid out in place of the park alleys. These are today's Horodetskoho, Olhynska and Zankovetskoi Streets, as well as Ivan Franko Square with the theater of the same name.
Kyiv was filling up not only with new residential and administrative buildings, but also with people. Over the last quarter of the 19th century the city's population more than doubled, from 117,000 in 1874 to 248,000 in 1897. On a hot summer evening the city already felt very crowded.
The First Dacha Plots
How land was first divided into dacha plots is vividly shown in The Cherry Orchard, where Yermolai Lopakhin makes an enterprising offer to the orchard's owner, Liubov Andriivna: "Your estate is only twenty versts from the town, the railway runs close by, and if the cherry orchard and the land along the river are cut up into building plots and leased for dachas, you will have an income of at least twenty-five thousand a year." To which Liubov Andriivna gives her famous reply: "Dachas and summer people are so vulgar, forgive me."
In reality, not everyone was as sentimental as Liubov Andriivna. Landowners of the time grew rich thanks to the dacha boom.
Landowner Yosyp Pekhovskyi and Countess Lidiia Kicheieva were the founders of the dacha settlement of Vorzel. Pekhovskyi's private land alone yielded around 245 dacha plots of a quarter of a hectare each.
Such a plot, including contributions for public needs, cost up to 1,000 rubles, which was no small sum at the time. A minor official earned about 25–30 rubles a month, teachers and doctors 80–100 rubles, and mid-level civil servants 150–300 rubles.
The owners whose land was carved into dachas entered history, and some of their names are still heard almost every day. Lidiia Kicheieva, for example, is remembered whenever a commuter train passes the Kycheieve platform.
But the best-known place name of this kind in Kyiv is Karavaievi Dachi. The area that bears this name once belonged to Volodymyr Karavaiev, a renowned surgeon and professor at Kyiv University. Soon after his death, his granddaughter Olha divided the estate into nearly 250 plots and sold them off. By around 1910 the land had been built up, yet for some reason it became more of a workers' settlement than a dacha colony.
Pushcha-Vodytsia, Sviatoshyn, Darnytsia and Boiarka, on the other hand, were dacha country through and through. In Sviatoshyn alone around 500 dacha plots were allotted, and they were nearly five times larger than the standard Soviet-era six hundred square meters.
Summer residents of the time usually wanted at least one desiatina of land (about 1 hectare). Some, like the Bulgakov family, were determined to buy a plot even though they did not own a home in Kyiv.
In 1900 the Bulgakovs bought a sizable plot of two desiatinas from the landowner Krasovskyi. The land was in Bucha, close to the railway line. Location mattered a great deal: dachas near the city limits could be reached by suburban tram.
How Summer Residents Got to Their Dachas
A 1913 map of Kyiv shows a tram to Sviatoshyn running along the Brest-Litovsk Highway (today's Beresteiskyi Avenue). The route opened in 1901. The tram ran from the Triumphal Gates, where the Povitroflotskyi Bridge stands today, to the 4th Clearing of Sviatoshyn, now the intersection of the avenue with the ring road. Somewhat later the line was extended to the 5th Clearing, by today's Dachna bus station. A ride cost 20 kopecks, which was not cheap: the same money bought a kilo of pasta or half a kilo of meat in a shop.
Still, dachas near the railway were in the greatest demand. Trains were even called "dacha trains." Their cars were of a lighter design, and they ran only in summer, sometimes also in spring or autumn. Dacha trains went to Vorzel, Boiarka and Darnytsia. A ticket to Bucha cost 30 kopecks, to Darnytsia 15 kopecks, and a trip to Vorzel cost the same as the suburban tram, 20 kopecks.
There was also a local shuttle train running from Darnytsia to the bank of the Dnipro. It was fast and cheap: the 5 km trip cost 5 kopecks. There were also horse-drawn cabs, the taxis of their day, but they cost many times more.
Dacha Architecture of the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries
Times change, but summer residents do not: just like today, wealthy dacha owners of that era built houses as good as their city homes. The early 20th century was also the age of Art Nouveau, and the style reached the dachas too. Its hallmark here was the combination of brick walls with wooden elements.
Dacha houses were built for full-time living, since people went to the dacha not for a weekend but for weeks or months at a time. Some spent the whole summer there. The Bulgakovs did exactly that, taking everything they needed with them, even the piano.
"There were many young people in the family. Everyone loved music, and in spring the piano was sent off to the dacha, and in autumn it came back home together with its owners," recalled Inna Lystovnychi, daughter of the owner of the Bulgakov house on Andriivskyi Descent.
Leisure of Kyiv's Summer Residents
Summer residents loved not only to play music themselves but also to listen to others, so evening concerts were frequently organized in the dacha settlements. Other arts were popular too, especially theater. Vacationers served as both audience and actors, and amateur theaters became highly fashionable.
In 2013, an exhibition titled "The Bulgakovs' Dacha" held in Bucha displayed a poster from this dacha settlement dated August 8, 1910. The event, called "Festivities," promised "children's games and amusements, a hot-air balloon, recitation and dancing to a military band." The poster also mentioned prizes for the youngest participants: "children taking part in the recitation will receive books as keepsakes."
The same poster announced two performances by the amateur theater: Columbine and Separation Is Also a Lesson. Among the actors listed was Mikhail Bulgakov, under the stage name "Mr. Agarin."
Plenty of amusements were invented for children. One of the most popular was the game of "giant steps": long ropes reaching the ground were tied to the top of a tall pole, and children grabbed them and ran in a circle, taking truly giant strides.
Gardening
Festivities aside, there was work to be done. Kyiv's summer residents were passionate about gardening. They planted not just cherry orchards, and certainly not the potatoes and apples grown by peasants; they tried to establish plant species not native to Kyiv soil. Countess Uvarova, for example, set aside a separate area for exotic plants. Sadly, those plants have not survived, but not far away in Vorzel another overseas guest still grows: a liriodendron, or tulip tree. This North American member of the magnolia family was planted in 1914 on the plot of Zherebtsov, secretary of the Kyiv Zemstvo Board. Every June the tree blooms with yellow flowers that resemble tulips.
Community Life of Kyiv's Summer Residents
Community came first. The dacha settlements set up so-called improvement societies. Their job was not only to keep order but also to make residents maintain cleanliness and comfort in their own areas. A whole set of rules was drawn up: keep the street outside your fence clean, do not dump manure there, do not burn leaves or garbage in summer, and do not patch potholes on a public road without permission from a local official.
What Has Survived
Two world wars and the Soviet "war on palaces" left little of even the grandest dachas of that era. The Bulgakov cottage in Bucha cannot be seen either: it burned down in 1918. In 2011, however, a garden was planted on its site and a monument was erected.
Still, there are a few places in and around Kyiv where you can see the dachas of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A fine example of dacha Art Nouveau stands at 130/1 Beresteiskyi Avenue (formerly Peremohy Avenue): a two-story brick house with a wide veranda and a wooden balcony, both decorated with wood carving.
Nearby Lvivska Street also has architectural gems, such as house No. 80-t. It is small but impresses with its lavish style: stucco molding, rich decoration and gilded sculptures.
In Irpin, at 20 Stelmakha Street, stands the former dacha of Mykola Chokolov. This Art Nouveau dacha has survived in remarkably good condition. Chokolov was a first-guild merchant who owned a distillery and yeast factory and a printing house, was elected to the city duma and served as head of the Kyiv Merchants' Assembly. All this allowed him to buy one of the best plots in town, close to both the river and the railway station. The architectural landmark later became one of the buildings of the writers' retreat.
Only Countess Uvarova's dacha has remained essentially as it was.
In Soviet times it housed a local school, but after the collapse of the USSR and the restoration of the historic building it became the Uvarov House museum.
