In Western Europe, castles are major tourist magnets and money makers. But in Ukraine, most castles stand abandoned and are falling apart.
A group of volunteers wants to change that. They have created the 12 Vartovykh (“12 Guards”) charity fund, which employs creative media campaigns to promote the abandoned Ukrainian castles and raise money for their renovation.
“We found such amazing castles that it was impossible to not start all of this,” the founder of the initiative, Lala Tarapakina, told the Kyiv Post.
There are about 300 castles in Ukraine. The majority are state-funded, but only a few of them were restored and are tourism destinations. Most of the castles are either in ruins or in urgent need of restoration.
New idea
The castle initiative started this summer. It originated with a traveling project Tarapakina led.
Tarapakina, 43, a marketing specialist and the author of guidebooks, started exploring Ukraine’s destinations in 2014. She says that, after Russia annexed Crimea, she wanted to discover what else Ukraine had to offer tourists.
“I thought that maybe there were beautiful places that can get a new life and we would be able to spend money in our country instead of going abroad,” she said.
She found multiple picturesque places all over the country and started sharing them on an online platform called “Found in Ukraine” — “so that people have a stimulus to go off the beaten track,” she said.
The traveler says she has driven 350,000 kilometers and has been to nearly every city and village in Ukraine over the last five years. During her expeditions, Tarapakina realized that Ukraine had quite a few magnificent castles that most of Ukrainians had never heard of.
“I fell in love with these castles,” she says.
Tarapakina believes that these sites can be powerful tourism magnets, which is why she launched 12 Guards.
Tarapakina picked 12 castles located in six Ukrainian oblasts. Among them are those in the worst condition, such as the Khustskyi Castle built in the 12th century as a fortification of Khust, now a town in Zakarpattia Oblast. Only fragments of the building have survived.
The list also features castles that are in better shape but are little known, such as Sharivskyi Castle, a Gothic Revival building constructed in the 19th century and located in Sharivka village, Kharkiv Oblast.
Tarapakina called the initiative “12 Guards” to honor the so-called “guards” of the castles — local volunteers who take care of them.
The Earl Badeni Palace is a building that mixes classicism and baroque styles, which was rebuilt at the beginning of the 20th century by Polish politician Stanisław Badeni in Koropets village, Ternopil Oblast. (Vika Sviatnenko)
Campaign
According to Tarapakina, it isn’t easy to motivate people to donate money for the restoration of historical sites. She says that they are much more willing to financially help sick children or homeless animals.
The successful crowdfunding for the restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris, a medieval Catholic cathedral in France which caught fire in April, is rather an exception, Tarapakina says. That campaign raised over $1 billion for Notre-Dame over several days.
As a result, Tarapakina decided to make the campaign as creative as possible. Along with Kyiv-based Royenko Marketing Agency, Tarapakina started promoting the initiative using the most unexpected platform — Tinder, a dating app.
They created profiles for the featured castles on Tinder which described what they were “feeling.”
“Loneliness destroys… I have been alone for over 100 years. I want to meet someone, tell my story, hold some celebration or even a festival for friends,” one of the castles’ profiles reads.
Tarapakina says that the castles’ Tinder profiles received numerous messages of praise from other users and their campaign got wide coverage in Ukrainian media.
“People from all over the world messaged (us) that they were thrilled by this idea,” she said.
Apart from that, with the help of film school students, 12 Guards is making two short films about Ukrainian castles. Tarapakina says they want to present them at film festivals abroad. She hopes that such a platform as a famous film festival will help to attract the attention of the international community to the problem, especially since many of the castles didn’t belong to Ukrainians back in their heyday.
Goals
As the initiative’s team traveled to the castles, they tried to be socially responsible tourists and made time to at least clean something or remove some trash from the buildings.
However, Tarapakina says that they soon realized that the castles are being destroyed fast and just cleaning them isn’t enough.
She says that, after their first trip to Dakhovskyi manor, a 19th-century building located in Cherkasy Oblast, they returned there a year and a half later and were surprised to discover it was in much worse condition: part of the roof had collapsed.
“The situation is sad because of its bad dynamics,” Tarapakina says.
For that reason, the initiative wants to first raise money to bring castles out of the danger zone and make sure they don’t go to ruins before there’s an opportunity to restore them.
As for restoration, since the state doesn’t provide funding for that, Tarapakina believes that it will be most effective to involve companies interested in the development of the surrounding region.
Twelve Guards already has one successful example of such cooperation. They brought together German chemical company BASF and the Kharkiv Oblast authorities. In the end, each invested Hr 3 million ($118,000) last year to restore Sharivskyi Castle. Part of the renovation has already been carried out.
However, Tarapakina says that the restoration of a castle costs millions of dollars, so there is a long road ahead.
The majority of the castles are located in villages and small towns, so even if they regain their attractive appearances, there is still a problem of poor infrastructure.
The director of Svirzh Castle, Volodymyr Mandziak, says that his site rarely gets visitors — they don’t even charge them for entrance. According to Mandziak, the surrounding roads and services are poor in Svirzh village.
“There’s not even a place to buy a cup of coffee,” Mandziak told the Kyiv Post.
But Tarapakina believes that the restoration of castles will attract investors and entrepreneurs to develop infrastructure around them and start small businesses.
Where tourists come, new hotels and restaurants always appear, she says.
To donate to the 12 Guards charity fund go to www.12vartovykh.com.
