The most popular picnic spot in Sevastopol was once its primary execution ground.
Maksimova Dacha — the estate of Aleksey Andreyevich Maksimov, merchant, contractor and city head of Sevastopol — occupies the Khomutova Balka, a ravine in what is now the Leninsky district of the city, roughly six kilometres from the historic centre. What was built here in the 1890s as a European-style park-estate, with fountains, ornamental ponds, a winter garden and a menagerie, became in 1920–1921 the principal site of mass executions in Sevastopol during the Red Terror, and then again in 1941–1944 a site of violent death under German occupation. Today it functions as an informal recreation area: families arrive on weekends in summer, make fires, grill sausages, and play games. The ponds have silted up. The ruins of the main house are covered in ivy. Craters from aerial bombs are still visible in the ground. No marker identifies what happened here.
Historical Context
Aleksey Maksimov and the Estate in the Ravine
The estate was conceived in the early 1890s by Aleksey Andreyevich Maksimov, a building contractor who had made his fortune through construction projects in Sevastopol — most notably a contract for stone quarrying in the Khomutova Balka itself, whose limestone had gone into the construction of the Alexandrovsky Dock, at the time the largest dry dock on the Black Sea. Having transformed a worked-out quarry into a garden, Maksimov commissioned the architect and artist Valentin Avgustovich Feldman — who had graduated from the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1889 and settled in Sevastopol — to design the entire complex. Gardeners were brought from the Nikitsky Botanical Garden in Yalta. Maksimov personally imported saplings from Italy, Bulgaria and Turkey. The result was the most elaborately landscaped private estate in the Sevastopol area: terraced slopes, a series of cascading ornamental ponds, a summer house (also called the hunting pavilion), a Moorish pavilion, a conservatory with a swimming pool, a chapel, a wine cellar, a forge, stables and an aviary for exotic animals. The estate’s produce — fruit, vegetables, wine — was regularly sent to city orphanages and hospitals. Locals called it Little France.
In September 1901, Maksimov was elected city head (gorodskoy golova) of Sevastopol by a majority of exactly one vote.
The Revolution of 1905 and the Fall of Maksimov
During the Russian Revolution of 1905, following the October Manifesto issued by Emperor Nicholas II on 30 October 1905, Maksimov took a stance that would eventually cost him everything. He admitted so-called narodnye deputaty (people’s deputies) — including Lieutenant Pyotr Schmidt, who would soon lead the Sevastopol Uprising aboard the cruiser Ochakov — to speak before the city council. He also sheltered sailors at the dacha during the unrest. After the uprising was crushed, these acts of sympathy marked Maksimov as politically unreliable in the eyes of the naval military authorities. In May 1908, Rear Admiral Robert Viren — the temporary military governor of Sevastopol and commander of the Black Sea Fleet — ordered a search of the dacha and initiated Maksimov’s suspension from office, which Interior Minister Stolypin executed. Anonymous accusations of substituting inferior building materials in state contracts added to the pressure. On 20 August 1908, Maksimov died. Official accounts attributed it to a heart attack; city sources consistently report that he shot himself. He was fifty-three. The entire city came to his funeral.
The estate was put up for auction, found no buyer, and began slowly to deteriorate. The Maksimov family was stripped of the property after 1917.
The Red Terror: Mass Executions, 1920–1921
After Soviet forces took Sevastopol at the end of the Russian Civil War in November 1920, the Cheka — the All-Russian Emergency Commission — established an office at the dacha. What followed was one of the bloodiest episodes of the Red Terror in Crimea. Officers and soldiers of the White Army, civilian professionals, teachers, nurses, engineers, actors and port workers were brought to the Maksimova Dacha and shot. Executions were carried out most frequently against the stone wall beside the rectangular pool in the park. The condemned were made to dig their own graves before being shot — sometimes from machine guns — with one bullet allocated per prisoner; those not killed outright were beaten with rifle butts, stones and bayonets. The head winemaker of the estate, Averyan Kostenko, later described to his children how, after each execution session, the soldiers would come to his cellar to drink wine. According to Russian Wikipedia, more than 8,000 people were shot in the first week alone following the establishment of Soviet power in the city. The estate became, in the words of the Sevastopol historian Arkady Chikin, “a single mass grave for hundreds of people.” Among those killed was one of Maksimov’s own sons.
After the Terror
In 1924, the estate was converted into a colony for homeless children (besprizorniki), who reportedly told legends of underground tunnels from which nobody returned. The Bezbozhnik (Atheist) commune operated here for a period, attempting to revive farming, without success. From 1927, a workers’ sanatorium functioned on the grounds; a new sanatorium building was added in 1935. People came from across the Soviet Union to rest there.
The Second World War
When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, the Maksimova Dacha was incorporated into the rear defensive line of the Sevastopol Defence Region. A military hospital and a medical battalion of the Black Sea Fleet were established on the grounds. The grottoes and underground tunnels — some of which dated to the pre-estate quarrying period and further, given the archaeological evidence of Roman and early medieval hydraulic structures in the ravine — were converted into air-raid shelters. The German bombardment caused severe damage to the estate buildings. When Sevastopol fell to German forces in July 1942, executions resumed at the dacha: Yad Vashem records the Maksimova Dacha as a killing site for Jewish residents of Sevastopol during the occupation. An unknown number of Soviet soldiers and civilians were also killed here during this period. The estate was liberated along with the city in May 1944, but by then most of its architectural fabric had been destroyed. According to resident and cultural figure Vladimir Sergienko, who lived at the dacha during the war, “these stones are literally soaked in blood.” After the war, proposals to restore the estate were never implemented.
What We Found
There will be no photographs: this site was visited when the author was a child.
Today, Maksimova Dacha is a popular resting place for locals. They come here at weekends during summer, or on national holidays, make fires, grill sausages and play games. The villa is just ruins now. All the ponds are silted. Around — tonnes of rubbish. And nothing more. If you go a little further around, you could be lucky to find some artefacts from the Second World War. Further in, some abandoned caves are also quite interesting to visit. It is a huge territory with lots of things to see. And always, while going, you have this strange and unique atmosphere around. It is quite hard to explain — but you just need to see it.
Current Status
As of 2026, the Maksimova Dacha park is a protected natural area (osobo okhranyaemaya prirodnaya territoriya) of regional significance, established as such on 25 December 1978, covering 83.9 hectares. It is simultaneously listed as a regional cultural heritage monument under both the Russian Federation (EGROKN ID: 921721307600005) and Ukrainian heritage registers, reflecting the contested administrative status of Sevastopol, which is internationally recognised as Ukrainian territory, currently under Russian military control following the 2014 annexation of Crimea. The estate ruins — including the Moorish pavilion, the summer/hunting house, the apiary structure and the retaining walls — are accessible and partially visible. A commemorative stone was placed near the site in 1995 during the Week of Memory marking the 75th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, with a design by architect Georgy Grigoryanets for a future memorial cross. The memorial cross itself has not been built. The park continues to function as an informal recreation and picnic area for Sevastopol residents. No formal restoration of the architectural elements has been carried out.
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