November 7, 2009 (posted November 9, 2009)
As the sun was setting yesterday, I quietly witnessed the end of something. It’s rather hard to pin-point what that “thing” was, but its quietus was very distinct.
I was in Oakville yesterday and recalled an incident, which happened almost three years ago. A historic bronze monument in the Taras Shevchenko Museum and Memorial Park went missing. This heritage site was marked with the first monument to Taras Shevchenko in North America. Likened to a poet-bard, Shevchenko is to Ukrainians as Shakespeare is to the English or Goethe to Germans. The eleven-foot bronze figure of Shevchenko was hacked off at the ankles sometime over the Christmas holidays in 2006. Copper prices soared and the bronze sculpture was stolen from the park and peddled for its intrinsic material value.
The incident compelled me to return to the Memorial Park, having last visited the place several years when the statue was intact. The two visitations were markedly different experiences. My initial visit was at the height of summer with the grounds well tended and flowering. It was a peaceful Sunday afternoon and I can recall feeling a deep solace that day. I remember thinking this place had a unique quality—the tree-lined alleys, the classical landscaping, the historic monument, the cornfields that surrounded it all. Oddly, to be there was to be in another time in some other place.
Late 2009, all has changed. The property is now derelict, slated for residential development. Amongst thistles and overgrown brush stands a defaced and disembodied granite base where the Shevchenko statue once stood. A pair of bronze shoes, weeds, mature trees marked for cutting—these are the vestiges of something’s end.
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February 24, 2010 at 1:13 pm
Margaret Rodgers
Hi Olex
Given the politics, I am wondering if the statue was actually sold for scrap or was it stolen and salted away. Maybe it will turn up one day. I am not fully informed of the Ukrainian factions that exist here in Canada and presumably elsewhere but they could play into the destruction. I am reminded of the monument to the Montreal massacre that was defaced, its plaque wrenched off and dumped in the underbrush behind the VAC Clarington. What the focus group did was raise money for another.
However the loss of the property to development is the juggernaut of “progress” that we all live under. Who gets the money for the sale of lots?
Follow the money . . .
February 28, 2010 at 7:04 pm
curator by day
Thanks Margaret for your post… two Oakville youths were charged with possession of stolen property back on January 1st, 2007. It didn’t appear as though the theft was politically motivated, however. The head of the monument was discovered (see blog picture) and the body was allegedly melted down for it’s copper content. You’re right to invoke the words of Bruce Cockburn: “Follow the money…”