Nine years after Ukraine gained independence, the country's national symbol, the trident, replaces the hammer and sickle on the faзade of parliament
of independent Ukraine, the tryzub.
Workers mounted tryzubs, or tridents, on the Verkhovna Rada's facade and two side walls on May 30, implementing a January parliament resolution that ordered Soviet symbols on the building to be replaced.
The three 170-kilogram tryzubs were made in the western city of Lviv and brought to Kyiv by a team of 10 workers.
The tridents were made of copper and covered with anti-corrosive material, construction workers on the site said.
Concrete-molded Soviet symbols were chipped off the building earlier this year, although parts of the Soviet hammer-and-sickle emblem and the Cyrillic letters CCCP – the Russian acronym of USSR, or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics – could still be found lying outside the Rada building.
“You should take a letter as a souvenir, it'll be a relic soon,” advised one of the builders who accompanied the new tryzubs from Lviv.
The symbol replacement process caused virtually no stir in the Rada, either among leftists or nationalists. There was no debate on the topic, and Communists – contrary to journalists' expectations – did not gather outside the building to protest.
The resolution to remove Soviet symbols from the Rada building was one of the first decisions approved by the legislature's pro-government majority, which in January split with the leftist opposition and held several session outside parliament to protest activities of the then-speaker, Oleksandr Tkachenko.
Deputies reunited after the leftists agreed to the majority's demand that the hard-line Tkachenko be replaced by centrist Ivan Pliushch.
The leftist deputies have appealed to the Constitutional Court to rule on the legitimacy of the decisions approved by the majority outside the Rada building, but the court has yet to announce its verdict.
