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Skver Peremohy (Victory Park)

The Opera House faces the Victory Park. In the 17th century there used to be the Church of the Myrrh Bearing Women and an old cemetery. When in the 1930s the church was demolished, the site was designated for the construction of a huge Theatre of Mass Musical Shows with a hall for 1000 seats. A design created by Moscow architects-constructionists, the Vesnins brothers, amazed with its immensity: with the help of special tools the stage could be transformed into a circus arena, and the audience — into the hall for events and public meetings, so that columns of demonstrators could go through it via the two side exits and move further down Sumska Street. But in 1934 Kiev became the capital of Ukraine, and this fantastic project was never implemented. A foundation of the theatre was used for the construction of a residential building, and in the 1940s the Victory Park with a very beautiful fountain called the Mirror Stream (designed by V. Korzh) which has become one of the city’s symbols was laid on the site of the waste land.

Behind the fountain there is the Alley of Komsomol Heroes (Leninist Komsomol is a youth political organisation of the Soviet period which is gone now).