Russian Drone Incinerated 18th-century Ukrainian Church

A Russian drone has reduced to ashes a 1726-built church in Ukraine, which officials say was a rare surviving example of wooden Cossack architecture from that era.

Over the weekend, a Russian drone struck the Holy Vvedenska [Presentation] Church in southern Ukraine’s Beryslav historic settlement, setting it on fire, reported local news site Most. Photos after the attack show nothing was left standing of the brightly painted, blue and green Cossack church, as it is commonly called, which was made without a single metal nail. The Zaporizhyan ecclesiastical design belonged to the Middle Dnieper architectural school and was built with wooden pegs instead of nails, using oak from a fortress.

The church “was a unique architectural monument of national significance that had been an integral part of the history of our city for almost three centuries,” Oleksandre Alchiev, head of the Beryslav City Military Administration, wrote on Facebook.

Over the centuries, the church has been dismantled and reassembled several times, while managing to survive invading armies and the Bolshevik Revolution. It was also, ironically, under the administration of the Russian-affiliated Moscow Patriarchate at the time of the attack.

Beryslav is located in the Kherson region, which was largely occupied by Russia at the start of its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainian troops then liberated part of the strategic area en route to Crimea, though it remains under constant attack by Russian forces. In April, a Russian strike also destroyed Kherson’s historic Donetsiv-Zakharzhevsky Manor, built in 1835.

Meanwhile, The Art Newspaper reported that a Lviv-based organization has appealed on social media for any images of the “wooden church,” as the Beryslav monument is also called, so that it can create a digital model of it.