The exhibition showcases «Architectural Journeys Through Life» by the artist, restorer, architect, art historian, Associate Professor of the Department of Architecture and Сonservation, the Institute of Architecture, Lviv Polytechnic. Kost Prysiazhnyi passed away more than ten years ago, but friends, colleagues, and students assure us: «In our minds, he is still with us».
The exhibition was initiated and organized by one of his students, Oksana Boiko, together with the curator of the museum’s art projects, Roman Zilinko.
Graphic and picturesque depictions of the architecture and landscapes of Lviv, Boiko region villages, Crimea, Polissia and Transcarpathia, atmospheric places of Transylvania, Priashiv, Heidelberg… All this is presented here, in two small rooms of the small exhibition hall «In Shelter».
Kost Prysiazhnyi loved to travel, and these travels inspired him. Wherever he went, he took paints and a sketchbook with him and created drawings, linocuts, and watercolour paintings. He painted Lviv with special reverence. Nothing prevented him, a native of freedom-loving Zaporizhzhia, from truly falling in love with this city.
«He liked Lviv a lot. He was an integral part of its cultural landscape. He attracted attention with his creative and at the same time aristocratic appearance», notes Oksana Boiko.
He first visited Lviv in 1972, when he worked as an architect and designed a sanatorium in Truskavets. The famous restorer Liubart Lishchynskyi showed him the city.
«He showed me the secret corners of Lviv – its cellars, staircases, rooftops, art studios, and pubs. That was when the second half of my life began», recalled Prysiazhnyi.
Ever since he decided to live here, he fought for every building and every detail, understanding that without them the city would lose its charm, uniqueness, and elegance. Here, he found like-minded people who inspired him and with whom he created. He worked in the restoration workshops of what is now the Ukrzakhidproektrestavratsiya Institute.
While preparing his first restoration project – a church in Drohobych – he felt a special connection to the past. This was followed by expeditions to the Carpathian Mountains, churches of Bukovyna region, and Ukrainian architectural monuments in Romania and Slovakia. He took part in the restoration of the Opera House and worked as a research associate at the State Historical and Cultural Reserve in Belz. Later there was a restoration sketch of the City Arsenal and the Shevska Tower, which he restored together with his colleagues, only to later painfully witness the transformation of its premises into a commercial project. He also wrote numerous articles published in local periodicals and professional journals.
A man of an extraordinary fate – a Ukrainian with German blood in his veins. His father, Adolf Steinhauer, was a teacher and an ethnic German from the Rotfront settlement in the Dnipropetrovsk region. In 1937, he became a victim of the NKVD’s repressive apparatus and was sentenced to death on charges of counter-revolutionary and nationalist propaganda. Fearing for her child’s life, his mother, Maria Prysiazhna, altered her one-year-old son’s documents: she changed his name from Karl to Konstantyn, invented the patronymic Vasyliovych, and registered him under her surname.
«I do not want to belong where I do not truly belong». These words from a poem by the French poet Jacques Prévert, whose poetry collections he loved to give to friends (as he delighted in giving books), became a kind of motto of his life: the search for his people, his circle of like-minded individuals, and his true place of work.
Kostia Prysiazhnyi is remembered as a talented architect and artist, a man of encyclopedic knowledge and extraordinary intuition, and a romantic at heart. However, he was first and foremost a restorer from God, a god of restoration, a fighter for professional restoration, for the preservation of valuable buildings, paintings or their individual elements. Having very deep knowledge in this field, he was keen to learn from the experience of other specialists, often from European and Asian countries he loved to visit and whose architecture he carefully studied. His travels took him to Uzbekistan, Dagestan, Estonia, Lithuania, Georgia, Romania, Slovakia, North Macedonia, Turkey, and Germany. He later described this period of his life as «my romance with restoration». He always shared impressions from his journeys, speaking with enthusiasm about the history and culture of each people, their customs, traditions, and languages.
When the time came to pass on his experience to the younger generation, he joined Lviv Polytechnic at the invitation of Professor Andrii Rudnytskyi, working at the Department of Restoration and Reconstruction of Architectural Complexes. He took great joy in seeing his students become skilled restorers, with some going on to become respected scholars. Associate Professor Oleh Rybchynskyi preserves the warmest memories of Kostia Prysiazhnyi as a teacher, mentor, colleague, adviser, and friend.
On the artist’s birthday, January 15, the Lviv Open-Air Museum, where linocuts created by Kostia Prysiazhnyi in the 1970s are preserved, was filled with memories of him until dusk. These works were later included in one of the museum’s earliest guidebooks. His colleagues believe that his artistic legacy deserves a separate publication, and they continue to hope that it will one day be published.
