Attractions of Komendantivka

The burial pyramid in Komendantivka, based on the tombs of Egyptian pharaohs, is a 15-meter granite tetrahedron.

Oleksandr Bilevych, an officer of the Russian fleet, who participated in the Russian-Turkish war and fought in the Balkans, being in Egypt in the early 1860s as part of a limited contingent of Russian troops, impressed by the pyramids he saw there, built a pyramid temple in 1864 in to his estate near the village of Komendantivka.

The pyramid was built from granite blocks mined in a local quarry, which were pulled up by wooden chutes with cables. Since the blocks were held together with an expensive lime mortar with the addition of cattle blood and egg whites, construction took 13 years.

The building is three-story. The underground tier consisted of three funeral chambers connected by passages. An Orthodox church with an iconostasis and an altar was located on the first above-ground level. The upper tier served as a belfry. The building was crowned with an Orthodox cross.

In 1877, Bilevych's wife Sofia was buried in the tomb, and in 1916 - the builder of the Komendantivka Pyramid, which was consecrated as the Orthodox Church of Saint Sophia, was buried.

In the middle of the 20th century, the graves of the Bilevichs were destroyed, and a fertilizer warehouse was built in the pyramid.

Currently, the service has been restored by the UOC parish of the Moscow Patriarchate, and the church is being repaired. An extension was made to it, which with its modern appearance violates the compositional integrity of the architectural monument.