Kyiv Firefighting Museum: Vintage Fire Engines in Obolon

Almost every kid dreams at least once of becoming a firefighter: riding in a big red truck, putting out fires, rescuing people from burning buildings — and getting cats down from trees, of course. We have all had those thoughts. But time passes, children grow up, and not everyone ends up a firefighter. The interest, though, never quite goes away, does it? It is for people whose curiosity about firefighting still burns bright that the Firefighting Museum opened on January 26, 2004, at Fire Station No. 25 in Kyiv's Obolon district.

The station is said to be one of the largest in Europe. Besides the museum, it has summer and winter sports facilities where Kyiv's firefighters train and where international competitions are held.

So what is there to see? Visitors can get a close look at the earliest firefighting equipment ever used to fight blazes. Some of these machines are more than a hundred years old — the kind of strange contraptions our great-great-grandparents may have seen in action. Every exhibit has been fully restored and, if needed, can still demonstrate that it works. You will also find a collection of firefighting tools, documents and old photographs.

The oldest exhibits are horse-drawn carts used back in the 19th century. They carried barrels of water, and two firefighters worked a hand pump to push water into the hoses. The work was so exhausting that the crew had to take turns every 5–10 minutes. The hand pump was later replaced by the steam pump, which delivered many times the output with far less effort. This marvel of engineering had its drawbacks, too: heating the boiler took 15 to 20 minutes, so steam pumps were used only for very large fires or particularly important buildings.

In 1913 the first motorized fire engine appeared in the Russian Empire, built on a German Mercedes chassis. Later, Soviet factories began producing their own fire engines based on the ZiS-5 truck. The first of these ZiS engines arrived in Kyiv's fire service in 1936.

One of the museum's rarest exhibits is a ZiS-150 fire truck, a very scarce model. It was used solely to carry fire hoses — up to a hundred of them. When the truck arrived at a fire, a special mechanism quickly rolled out the hoses, which could stretch for more than a kilometer. That was a real advantage when there was no fire hydrant nearby.

Another interesting piece of equipment is a ladder truck on a GAZ-51 chassis, whose ladder reaches a height of 17 meters — useful only in towns or neighborhoods without high-rise buildings.

In short, anyone interested in firefighting, the history of Kyiv's first fire brigades, or fire engines is welcome at the Firefighting Museum!

Address: 6 Heroiv Polku Azov Street (formerly Marshala Malynovskoho Street), Obolon, Kyiv.