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A few of the Terra Dignitas-contest entries suggest breaking up the square—and Khreshchatyk itself—in an attempt to bring it down to human scale. Most, however, propose making it even more grand, and adding fountains. At least two would even build on top of the Hotel Ukraine building, which sits at one end of the Maidan. The building looks like a truncated version of any of the seven Stalin High-Rises in Moscow, which themselves resemble the Manhattan Municipal Building, designed by William Kendall. The current Kyiv version lacks a tower and a spire, which some contest participants would give it—topping it with the Ukrainian national symbol.

But the centerpiece of the competition, and likely of whatever is built in the square, is the memorial to the Heavenly Hundred. The winning entry in the memorial category, by a team of four women and one man from Italy, proposes something radically reserved. “The city is not a page that can be deleted and rewritten with each revolution,” the architects assert. The project uses tree rings as a visual metaphor for history and proposes to create stepped passageways as reminders and memorials, with gashes in the pavement to show wounds, and trees planted to create a “memory forest.” A tree stump will replace the remaining trunk of the Lenin monument.

Other proposals include something that looks a cross between Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust memorial in Berlin and a Russian-mafiosi graveyard, with large silhouettes of the dead cut into the slabs; a composition consisting of a bare-chested, bearded “free man” the size of a house, leaning on slabs intended to represent barricades, next to an even larger winged angel; another variation of Eisenman’s memorial, this one matching the outline of the map of Ukraine (pre- Russian invasion); a hundred illuminated metal rods on a “snow-white” slab; a blood-red “wave of freedom,” covering the entire square; a bunch of angels on a hill; a bronze man emerging from stone while breaking his chains; and an entire set of Socialist Realist bronze sculptures with titles such as “Innocent Victims Become Angels” (men in military uniforms taking flight) and “Feast of the Cross” (three men in military uniforms struggling to stand up a cross).

Only one entry suggests the seemingly obvious. “We believe that it is necessary to mainly maintain the existing composition . . . making an imprint of the first public reaction to the death of heroes,” that entry reads. The proposal is to use permanent materials to preserve the striking makeshift memorials that are still in the Maidan. One consists of hundreds of red glass lanterns placed in the square in the shape of the trident from the Ukrainian coat of arms. That these fragile lanterns have not been disturbed, sitting on the pavement in the city’s busiest square, with hundreds of unskilled cyclists, falling-down drunks, and other hazards passing through daily, seems like a miracle.

But the most affecting monument that exists right now is a memorial wall that climbs the to the side of the Maidan. More than a hundred small semicircles of gray bricks, symbolizing the cobblestones that some of the revolutionary fighters used as weapons, each cradles a black-and-white portrait of one of the dead, with the person’s region of origin at the top and his or her name, age, and occupation at the bottom. The youngest of the fallen memorialized here was a seventeen-year-old male student; the oldest was a seventy-five-year-old retired doctor, a woman. Most of the dead were middle-aged, and all but a couple of them were men.

But as I approached the top of the memorial, I noticed a photograph, and then two more, that were different: printed in color, with names and birth and death dates: men of forty-two, thirty-seven, and forty-one who died after the conflict in the Maidan ended. A man who noticed me taking notes complained, “Yes, they’ve been adding pictures—these are people who were killed in the East,” that is, in the war with Russia. Many more people have died in battle there, but only a few have had their pictures carried to the Maidan. The man seemed outraged by the fact that someone had dared to add to the Heavenly Hundred—although he himself was in the Maidan collecting money for the war effort.

At the end of the memorial wall, someone had added four more photographs that did not have cradles, bringing the total to a hundred and thirteen and making the effort to make the memorial permanent seem, perhaps, premature.

*This passage is taken from a translation by John Weir.