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Thousands of Doors of Odesa

A mosaic of thousands of ancient doors and gates creates Odesa’s unique face. Caring citizens, with the support from the EU, are working to preserve the unique cultural heritage by engaging actively in the initiative to restore 100 doors of Odesa’s historic buildings.

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About the project

A door is an organic and integral part of any building’s face, and very often it is the most important architectural solution focal point for the facade. This applies to all eras since humanity began to think about aesthetic design of housing and other buildings. Unfortunately, acts of nature, wars, casual vandalism and negligence became executioners of the unpronounced sentence for those centennial cultural heritage artefacts. During soviettimes , many unique masterpieces created by the skilful hands of carvers from the past were crudely destroyed, other survived fragmentarily, but driven to a pitiful state. Fortunately, there are old photographs that show the doors in their original glory. And there were also caring and active people, unique history and architecture connoisseurs of their city, who decided to recover this beauty. They see it as their objective to engage all who consider themselves Odesites – entreprenerus, politicians, activists, ordinary citizens – to this noble and important cause.

Along with the refurbishment of 100 doors, with EU support, to be performed by restoration artists with the assistance of local residents, Thousands Doors and DIRECT Project Initiatives Centre, civil society activists have planned a broad-drive communication and awareness-raising campaign. It will include, among other things, launching of a dedicated website with the posting of a historical doors catalogue on it, a series of restoration-related and architecture history workshops, public presentations and documentary videos about the project, a unique vocabulary of door-specific terminology, touring routes through the historical city centre, photo promenades and many other activities that go far beyond the project scope itself. And, for sure, achieving the goal of 1,000 restored doors of Odesa!

Project timeline: 28 months, 2022 – 2024

Project supported by

EaP Civil Society Facility (CSF), European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights for Ukraine (EIDHR) and the Global Civil Society Organizations Programme.

EaP Civil Society Facility (CSF) is an EU-funded project implemented by an international consortium led by the Irish organisation GDSI Ltd with the focus on building capacity of civil society organisations in 6 Eastern Partnership countries.

More: https://eapcivilsociety.eu/about/what-we-do

Project implemented by

NGO “Project Initiatives Centre DIRECT” is an Odesa civil society organisation engaged in development and implementation of projects in the fields of education, media, culture and tourism. The team promotes public initiatives among international donors and develops a grant culture.

NGO “Thousands of Doors” is a team of like-minded people whose goal is to preserve the historical doors of Odesa, a particular part of the city’s cultural heritage. With their help, the 1000 Doors team traces the entire development path of the city’s carpentry through deep immersion in the restoration process.

https://1000doors.org/
https://www.facebook.com/1000doorsofodessa/
https://www.instagram.com/1000doorsofodessa/
https://www.instagram.com/project_initiatives_center/
https://www.facebook.com/project.initiatives.center