The lighthouse is a hyperboloid structure, a form in which straight steel bars, each perfectly straight on its own, are arranged on a twist so that together they trace a graceful curving surface. The result is a tower that is both extraordinarily strong and startlingly light, using a minimum of material to reach a maximum of height. It was designed in 1910 and built in 1911 by Vladimir Shukhov, the Russian engineer who pioneered these lattice shell towers and whose name became attached to the technique itself. Tucked inside the base of the soaring frame sits a modest one-story keeper's house, a small human dwelling at the foot of a structure that looks like pure engineering. Together with a smaller companion tower, the Stanislav Range Front Light, it forms a range light: line up the two and you are on the safe channel.

Function explains the beauty. The tower stands about 30 kilometers west of the city of Kherson, on an islet in the combined estuary where the Dnieper and the Southern Bug pour toward the Black Sea, and its job is to guide ships safely into the rivers across a vast and shallow expanse of water. It takes its name from the nearby Cape of Adzhyhol, and it is reachable only by boat, a solitary landmark rising straight out of the water with no road to it and no town around it. The site is open to the public, though the tower itself stays closed, so most who come simply circle it, looking up at the lacework of steel against the wide estuary sky and the low horizon of the delta beyond.

For more than a hundred years the lighthouse has done its quiet work at the mouth of the Dnieper, a rare survivor from an age of bold engineering experiment. Shukhov's lattice towers influenced architects and engineers far beyond Russia, and this one, standing alone on its islet, is among the most beautiful of them still in use. Its long vigil was interrupted on 22 July 2022, when the tower was damaged in a Russian missile attack, with three rockets striking the structure. That an object so slender and so old has endured at all, out on its exposed pier where river and sea meet, is a testament both to the mathematics that shaped it and to the stubborn purpose of a light that simply keeps showing ships the way home.