The Odessa Regional Council announced a plan for the restoration of the historical English Club, later Odessa Naval Museum.

The abandoned Museum of the Navy, on the right side of the Odessa Opera House (Lanzheronovskaya street 6), which burned down almost 16 years ago, was included in the list of cultural objects that will be restored within the framework of the State programme "Great Restoration".

This was disclosed by the Head of the Odessa Regional Council Grigory Didenko.

The museum has been closed since 2005. We have concentrated our efforts to include it in a new programme - “Big restoration” - and finally complete the work.

Grigoriy Didenko, Head of the Odessa Regional Council

According to him, the building restoration project needs to be updated. Deputy Natalya Danilko is now dealing with this issue.

The reworking of the project is estimated at one million hryvnia. The issue of allocating money will be considered at the next session of the regional council.

It should be noted that two billion hryvnias were allocated for the Big Restoration. Within the framework of the project, it is planned to restore 150 objects of cultural heritage in three years.

On April 2005, a fire broke out in the building of the English Club, built in 1842 on the project of George Toricelli, where the Odessa Naval Museum was located. Almost all the museum's exhibits were destroyed.

After that, in 2009, the then People's Deputy from the Party of Regions, Leonid Klimov, introduced a bill to the Verkhovna Rada, with which he tried to remove the building of the English Club from the register of architectural monuments.

At the end of the 2010s, the City Council allocated UAH 5 million for the priority work on the preservation of the building. In 2013, Governor Eduard Matviychuk promised to spend from 15 to 20 million hryvnias on the renovation of the building and the reconstruction of the museum. The Swiss designer Hugo Scher, the founder of the Shabo Wine Culture Center, was even involved in the development of the project.

In 2014, the facility was mothballed. By this time, they managed to restore the facade and carry out rough finishing works in the premises of the museum. After the cessation of work, the abandoned museum became a haven for the homeless. There were several small fires, and during the rains, the premises were flooded with water through the damaged roof.

The remains of the museum's exposition have been on public display since 2007 in one of the premises of the passenger complex of the Odessa sea station, but in 2016, the head of the Odessa customs office, Yulia Marushevskaya, asked the museum to move out in connection with the reconstruction. The remains of the museum moved to the Red warehouses of the Odessa port and became inaccessible to the general public.

Source: Dumskaya.net