A regular meeting of the commission on de-Russification, renaming and naming of streets, lanes, parks and squares within the Drohobych city territorial community, which is chaired by Deputy Mayor Yuriy Kushlyk, has taken place.
The commission reviewed the results of the community’s vote for names for parks and squares in Drohobych and discussed the measures taken by the local government to rebury NKVD bodies from the Soviet Soldiers Cemetery (formerly Eternal Flame).
Earlier, the Drohobych City Council held electronic consultations with the public, during which people chose names for parks and squares in Drohobych and Stebnyk that still do not have officially assigned names.
Unfortunately, despite the use of several public opinion monitoring tools, such as the E-dem service and Google forms, the community residents were not very active in the voting. A total of 271 respondents took part in the voting for Drohobych parks and 117 for Stebnyk.
The commission reviewed the results and held a vote, which will be forwarded to the Drohobych City Council for approval of the official names for the parks and squares.
The commission recommends the following names for the parks and squares in Drohobych:
– Park on Pylyp Orlyk – Volodymyr Velykyi Street (popularly called “Park of the Newborns”) 28.03 hectares – Svoboda Park
– Park on Truskavetska Street (near Bohdan Khmelnytskyi Park, near the lake) 9.68 ha – Pryozernyi Park
– Park on Pylyp Orlyk Street, 0.4 hectares – Andriyivskyi Park
– Lesia Ukrainka Street, 0.11 hectares – the issue has been temporarily postponed, as there is an initiative of the Lemko community to install a memorial sign there – therefore, the name of the park should correspond to the further concept of the territory.
– The park on Sambirska Street, 0.29 hectares – Prydorozhnyi Park
The commission also received a letter from the Department of Ecology and Natural Resources of the Lviv Oblast regarding the need to rename the park-monument of landscape art of local importance on Truskavetska Street (popularly known as “Culture and Recreation” and “Ivasyk-Telesyk”), as it still has the old name “General Vasyliev Park”).
Given the tight deadlines, the commission unanimously recommended renaming the park Ivasyk-Telesyk Park.
The commission also discussed the feasibility of allocating a land plot near the Solonyi Pond for a public garden and assigning it to St. George’s Church to protect it from possible commercial use. Therefore, the commission asked the community property department to prepare the necessary documents to allocate the land and assign it the status of a public garden.
The community property department was also instructed to bring the designated purpose of the land plots allocated for parks into line, as not all parks in Drohobych and Stebnyk have a recreational purpose.
The commission postponed consideration of the naming of Stebnyk’s parks and squares until the next meeting in order to involve the starosta and deputies from Stebnyk in the consideration of this issue.
As for the work on the reburial of the NKVD from the “Cemetery of Soviet Soldiers” (formerly “Eternal Flame”), Volodymyr Khanas, head of the Department of Culture and Tourism Development, briefly reported on this.
After receiving all the necessary accounting documents, they will be sent to the expert council, which operates under the Ministry of Culture, to obtain permission for the reburial of the remains. The results of the work will be presented to the commission at its next meeting.