No, it’s not a listed building; it’s simply a small late 19th-century house, with a shop on the ground floor and flats on the first floor. There aren’t many of these left in the Balashevka area in Kharkiv.

But many remember this building for its striking touch of Soviet modernism – a 1970s space-themed sgraffito by the Kharkiv artist Gennady Stepanovich Grishin. The work was repainted in 2011 ahead of Euro 2012 – originally, it was not quite so colourful.

On Ginzburg’s historical map of 1916, it can be seen that Georgiy Tarasenko Street was formerly known as Petinskaya Street, and Polevaya Street, at the junction of which this house stood, was divided into two parts – Polevaya and Novo-Polevaya. From 1919 to 2023, the street was called Plekhanovskaya Street.

On 12 June 2025, the house was destroyed by a strike from a Russian-made Shahed-136 kamikaze drone.

Three days after the strike, a cat named Marusya, who had been living in the shop, was rescued from the rubble of the building.

Although most of the wall featuring Grishin’s artwork survived the strike, it was soon dismantled along with the remains of the building due to its unsafe condition.