Monument to Leontovych Opens in Pokrovsk

Photo from Ukrinform

A monument to composer Mykola Leontovych, the author of “Shchedryk” or “Carol of the Bells” was opened in Pokrovsk, in the Donetsk region on Sunday.

The monument stands at the entrance of Pokrovsk’s Jubilee Park. Leontovych wrote Carol of the Bells – based on traditional Ukrainian folk chants – during the four-year-period that he was living in Pokrovsk, where he founded a music school.

The author of the monument – Honored Artist of Ukraine, a migrant from Gorlovka, Petro Antip told Ukrinforma correspondent about the monument to Pokrovsky opened in Pokrovsky.

“Our team of five people worked for almost three months on the creation of a monument, ” the monument’s creator Petro Antip said. He said that the sculptors Nikolai Biryansky, Ivan Gutim, Sergei Lebednitsky, as well as sculptor-master of bronze metal castor Alexander Serdyuk and architect Sergei Shaposhnikov helped to create the monument.

A truly Ukrainian monument, the bronze, granite and glass sculpture was cast in Kharkiv, molded in Kyiv, with granite from Zhytomyr, and glass from Dnipro.

“I generally love Ukrainian song and choral singing. It’s in my heart. So I wanted to show the composer realistically, to convey the spirit of that time – the beginning of the last century,” Antip said. “We studied history, worked very closely with the Pokrovsky Historical Museum, and the museum specialists provided us with the necessary information – from which shoes, which costume should be used, to create the image of the composer.”

At the opening ceremony, a children’s choir performed “Shchedryk.”