'The Bird of Hellas', Mariupol, Ukraine

A great bird worked in white and silver tesserae spreads across the wall, wings breaking into feathers, spirals and sharp geometric shards against blue, green and gold. Along the lower band, flat red, green and dark shapes run like a frieze beneath it. The room around it has been stripped: bare steel beams overhead, a plaster cornice half demolished, a sheet of glass propped against a column.

The mosaic is Boryviter, made in 1967 for the Aristocrat Restaurant. A boryviter is a kestrel: the bird that holds itself motionless on the wind, hovering in place. The original design was of a fighting bird, but the wall faced a window looking out to the sea, and Alla Horska and Borys Plaksii changed it: lighter, paler, a falcon rather than a combatant, the blues and greens tuned to the water outside. The work has also gone by The Bird of Hellas and The Dream.

It was made by seven artists: Viktor Zaretskyi, Alla Horska, Halyna Zubchenko, Hryhorii Pryshedko, Borys Plaksii, with Vasyl Parakhin and Nadiia Svitlychna. Several belonged to the Sixtiers, the generation of Ukrainian artists and writers also active in the human rights movement.

From Yevgen Nikiforov's series Ukrainian Soviet Mosaics, a photographic survey of monumental mosaic art across Ukraine.

Edition No: 3/10

Print Size: 16 × 24 inches

Orientation: landscape

Medium: digital print, Hahnemuhle Photo Rag

Year photograph was taken: 2015

Year print was produced: 2026

© Yevgen Nikiforov. Image courtesy of the photographer and used with permission. All rights reserved. No reproduction, distribution, publication or commercial use without prior written permission.

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