Worst restorations ever
With 2015 coming to a close, Russians have reason to look back and hang their heads in shame, when it comes to restorations of cherished bas-relief sculptures. In the past several months, several repairs to these works of art have been so awful that they’ve made news headlines. Sculptures have been destroyed, distorted, and made ugly. Meduza pauses to remember the three most egregious examples from the year. On the lefthand side of the images below, you’ll see what the sculptures looked like before their “restorations.” To the right, you can see what’s become of them now.
St. Petersburg, the nymph on the facade of the Panteleimon Badaeva House at the corner of Vosstaniya and Zhukovskaya streets
Photo: Alexander Demyanchuk / TASS / Scanpix
Moscow, the god Mercury at Kuznetsov House on Myasnitskaya street
Photo: Vkontakte group Nogina Square
St. Petersburg, Mephistopheles at 24 Lakhtinskaya street
Photo: Roman Vezenin; Sergei Konkov / TASS
Kaliningrad, incidentally, has no interest in lagging behind by Moscow and St. Petersburg. Admittedly, the Russian exclave’s sculptures were exactly as frightening even before they were restored.
Today we were taken to see the repaired university buildings. The regional government was especially proud to show us the building on Chernyshevsky street. “There was a restoration right here?” I ask Maslov. “Well, yes. And the stucco was restored,” Evgeny Alexandrovich answers. I get a little closer to the stucco and see the horrible face. I come back to Maslov: “So this is also a restoration?” “Yeeeeah,” the cultural heritage security chief says, scratching his head. “I guess the restoration artists couldn’t quite make sense of the original German photos.”