There is something about the Eiffel Tower that makes it one of the most replicable structures in the world. You can find duplicates of it everywhere, from the United Kingdom and Germany to Pakistan, Japan, and Mexico. China went as far as designing the entire town of Tianducheng as a copy of Paris’s most famous landmarks.
Inspired by this seemingly ubiquitous obsession, Ukrainian photographer Oleksandr Popenko started Little Paris, a photo series of Eiffel Tower replicas he finds around him. In Ukraine alone, Popenko discovered 140 towers and documented 90 of them. He prints the most noteworthy photographs as postcards, with the hopes of eventually turning the project into a photobook.
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“Paris entered my life in 2020 when I came to my native Vinnytsia and saw the replica installed there,” Popenko told Hyperallergic. The city’s endeavor to build a large copy of the Eiffel Tower stirred a range of emotions in him, “from hysterical laughter to outrage,” ultimately deepening the artist’s interest in the topic. Driven by anthropological curiosity, he decided to photograph the towers. Over three years of chasing these duplicates across the country, Popenko has covered over 12,000 miles.
Some towers are constructed by local governments or businesses, while others are created by communities themselves, shaping both their style and size.
“Probably the most admired tower among my Instagram followers is the one on the awning of the apartment building in Kyiv,” Popenko says. “Georgiy, the owner of this tower, screwed it to the entrance roof and connected string lights to it. He turns on the illumination when he’s in the mood for it, usually on holidays like Bastille Day.”
As a true vernacular phenomenon, Ukrainian versions of the Eiffel Tower exhibit local adaptations, reflecting on the history and culture of their communities, sometimes in a more stereotypical form. In Popenko’s collection, several are crafted in the motif of vyshyvankas, Ukrainian traditional embroidery patterns; another pays homage to the Chernobyl disaster’s brave liquidators. A few have even acquired functionality, like the tower featuring an electronic scoreboard installed at the local football stadium in Korosten.
Observing the overlap between the Eiffel Tower’s aesthetics and the local tastes in urbanism, Popenko knew that at least one tower should delve into the Christian theme. And he found it — a cross-shaped tower in Starunya, Ivano-Frankivsk region, in the predominantly religious western part of Ukraine. “I don’t know if it was intended to resemble the Eiffel Tower, but there is no doubt that structurally it is one,” Popenko concludes.
Essentially kitschy, the towers received a fair dose of criticism. In Khmelnytskyi, another city blessed with its own landmark a la française, public discontent resulted in a petition calling for the removal of the tower, which was made by local students and installed to celebrate Europe Day.
“The petition never got the required number of signatures, but on Google Maps, the tower’s location is still titled ‘Monument to Ukrainian Inferiority Complex,’” Popenko adds.
Usually, people can’t even explain their decision to install a replica of the French landmark. The desire to improve their surroundings with the Eiffel Tower and not anything else Popenko sees as “intuitive” based on the Western-inspired idea of beauty. “I only know one copy of the Eiffel Tower in Ukraine that has anything to do with France — a Frenchman installed it as a wedding present for his Ukrainian wife.”
Popenko believes the tower is so popular due to its simple, easy-to-duplicate shape and universal symbolism of everything that is perceived as good: love, romance, leisure, comfort, and Western prosperity. The latter holds a special place in the Eastern European mindset.
“Documenting this phenomenon for several years, I see some inner desire for well-being in it,” he said. “Sometimes naive, sometimes absurd, but very sincere and not imposed from the outside.”
Source: Hyperallergic.com