The Beatles on Liverpool Square, Vinnytsia

The Beatles monument in Vinnytsia is an art composition on Liverpool Square in the city centre, next to McDonald's and Gymnasium No. 17. Figures of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr stand in front of a submarine, and lamp posts with speakers play Beatles songs. It opened on City Day, 9 September 2017.

A square called Liverpool long before the Beatles arrived

Vinnytsia residents were calling this patch of trees and benches "Liverpool" for decades before any figures stood there. Nobody agrees why. The popular version points to the Krynychenka cafe, which stood roughly where McDonald's is now, and to pies stuffed with liver sold nearby. Local writer Oleksandr Shemet doubts that. He says the cafe's basement held a studio that cut Western songs onto used X-ray film, the Soviet bootleg records known as music "on bones", and young people gathered outside to listen and sing. Historian Oleksandr Fedoryshen thinks the truth sits somewhere between the two stories.

From a 2014 sketch to a City Day opening

Chief city architect Oleksandr Rekuta pitched the redesign in July 2014. His plan had four yellow rays laid into the paving, figures of the band in modern materials such as acrylic glass, metal and plastic, and a submarine visitors could step into for photos. He called the figures contemporary art compositions, not monuments, which kept them out of the long approval process a formal monument would need.

The square opened on 9 September 2017, Vinnytsia's City Day. President Petro Poroshenko, Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman and parliament chairman Andriy Parubiy all came. Serhiy Radchenko, who heads the Cherkasy Beatles club, was there too, and a cover band played.

Taken down after one week

The figures didn't last long in their first form. On 14 September 2017 the city removed them because people had been climbing, swinging and jumping on the structure. Two days later, on 16 September, they were back, reinforced and repaired. The submarine had also changed colour, from orange to the yellow of the song.

A year on, at its session of 28 September 2018, the city council made the nickname official: the place is now ploshcha Liverpul, Liverpool Square. Local press in 2024 and 2026 still describes the installation as standing.

Lennon elsewhere in Vinnytsia Oblast

The region has an older and stranger Lennon story. In December 1981, on the first anniversary of his death, graduates of a local school put up a sandstone Lennon by sculptor Oleksiy Alyoshkin in Mohyliv-Podilskyi, a few dozen metres from a Lenin statue. Officials had it taken down the next morning. A museum director took it in, and it now stands in one of the town's squares. See the John Lennon statue in Mohyliv-Podilskyi.