House with Cats

General Yahymovskyi's apartment house

Hoholivska Street, called Kadetskyi Lane until 1902, runs through the former Soldiers' Quarter, where low-ranking army men settled in the 19th century. In the early 20th century apartment houses sprang up here one after another, but none of them looks like No. 23. It was built in 1909 for Major General Ferdynand Yahymovskyi; some sources call him Colonel Fedir Yahymovskyi. On retiring, he decided to secure his old age with rent from the apartments.

The design came from Volodymyr Bezsmertnyi (1861–1940), a Kyiv civil engineer. He headed the provincial construction department for more than 25 years and served as Kyiv's chief architect in the 1920s. Because of the unusual decoration, Kyivans long credited the house to Vladyslav Horodetskyi, architect of the House with Chimeras. But archival documents studied during a heritage survey in 1999 confirmed that Bezsmertnyi was the author. Horodetskyi had nothing to do with it.

A Gothic screen façade

Art historians place the building in a strand of Art Nouveau that is rare in Kyiv: Gothic Revival Modernism. Behind it is an ordinary, rational apartment-house plan. In front, Bezsmertnyi set a screen façade of Romanesque and Gothic forms: a corner oriel turret with machicolations, double and triple arched windows, pointed gables and pinnacles. The Art Nouveau side shows in the asymmetry and in a few large, strongly sculpted details. Every window and balcony is different. The house is T-shaped, with four storeys on the street side and five facing the courtyard. The apartments turned out awkward, with long, narrow rooms and little light.

The green paint with white trim that makes the house so eye-catching came later. In photographs from the 1970s the façade is still pale brick.

Cats, owls and a devil under the roof

The house is named after two cats that have sat on either side of the large semicircular ground-floor window for more than a century, with arched backs, green eyes and red mouths. Owls watch over the entrance, and male masks line the window and balcony frames, each with individual, almost portrait-like features. Above the main window, chimeras hold a crowned cartouche with a monogram, and the whole composition is crowned by a fantastic creature that Kyivans call the devil.

Scholars read this cast in different ways. Some see a playful "game of the Middle Ages" and a folk-print fairy tale, others a mystical, humorous fantasy with a house-devil and cats like piggy banks. Local legend is simpler: the owls stand for wisdom, and the cats guard the home's comfort and prosperity against the devil's ill intent. With such company the house had a reputation for bad luck. It was also nicknamed Koshchei's Castle, a pun on the architect's surname: Bezsmertnyi means "deathless", like Koshchei the Deathless of the fairy tales.

Residents

From 1917 to 1920 this was the home of Stepan Tymoshenko (Stephen Timoshenko). He was one of the founders of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and later a world-famous engineer and Stanford professor, often called the father of modern engineering mechanics. A bronze memorial plaque by sculptor Marian Saveliev and architect V. Prykhodko was put up on the façade in 1995 and stolen in February 2016. The historian and ethnographer Mykola Levchenko also lived in the house.

The house today

The building came through the 20th century well, although a renovation in the 1970s destroyed most of the original interiors. It is listed as a monument of history and architecture. The apartments are privately owned and a law firm occupies the ground floor, so you cannot go inside. The real show is on the façade anyway. View it first from the opposite pavement of Hoholivska Street, then come closer to the window with the cats. Bulvarno-Kudriavska Street and Lukianivka are nearby, so the house fits easily into a walk around Old Kyiv.