Everybody knows that Kyiv is full of monuments, from the small alleyways, to house yards and green capital squares.

They can be large, tiny, ridiculous, funny, tremendous, witty, hidden somewhere behind the corner or towering above the city's skyline.

We go through them several times each day. Tour guides of our city show them to visitors of the city. We make photos of them, but in truth, we hardly know anything about most of them.

The majority of the Ukrainians know the basic history behind the personalities represented by some of most outstanding statues in Kyiv, including that to Hetman Bohdan Khmelnitsky, the famous Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko and Communist head Vladimir Lenin.

But there are is a large amount of less famous figures that we come across while wandering around the streets of capital. Many locals, and even some historians, wouldn't know them.

Take for example the statue of a guy in a hat sitting with a cup of coffee on Passage walkway to the right from Khreshchatyk street. The statue is always surrounded by city guests, who try to perch by the figure and take pictures. The monument represents the well-known modernist architect Vladislav Horodetsky, who has lived in our capital at the beginning of the 20th century. Among his creative works is the impressive House of Chimeras on Bankova Street, which is now the hall for reception of important international guests by the President of Ukraine. Among many buildings in Kyiv, he also was a designer of Actor's House on Yaroslaviv Val. The architect once lived in the above-mentioned House of Chimeras, which has on the roof statues of animals he saw on his safari trips to Africa.

After you can get a cup of delicious coffee less than a block up from Passage to Horodetskoho Street, and further up to Square of Ivana Franka, where you can see another hidden monument dedicated to the actor Mykola Yakovchenko.

The bronze figure of a man sitting on a bench with a dachshund Fan-Fan at his feet and pigeons flying about somehow matches naturally the city panorama and citizens walking by. The actor performed on the stage of the adjacent Ivan Franko Theater from 1927 and in 2000.

Just relax and sit for a while on the bench with famous actor and you will feel the real atmosphere of an actor in the process of thinking, thinking about future role, or maybe just having some time of relaxation after last performance. Any way here you will always feel positive.

An intriguing monument can be seen on Prorizna Street, the street that crosses Khreshchatyk and rises up to Ukraine's Golden Gate monument.

It's the statue to Panikovsky, a major hero in the novel 'Zolotoy Telenok' ('The Golden Calf) by Odesa-born authors Ilya Ilf and Evgeniy Petrov, both famous Soviet-day writers.

A swindler and a goose-robber, Panikovsky helped the main hero of the novel, Ostap Bender, blackmail a closet millionaire.

And in any way you will see here in our city many more hidden monuments that are real creative masterpieces and will always attract thousands of tourists from different corners of the world.