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The Chapekar Wada is the ancestral home of the young trio of Chapekar siblings — Damodar Hari (29), Balkrishna Hari (26) and Vasudev Hari (19) — who were hanged for shooting British officer W. C. Rand and his military aide on June 22, 1897, during the diamond jubilee celebration of Queen Victoria’s coronation.

The attack place was near the present-day Savitribai Phule Pune University campus, and while the army aide died on the spot, Rand succumbed on July 3, 1897, and the trio were hanged on different dates in April 1888 and May 1899.

The Chapekars idolized another stalwart, Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who always wrote strongly in favor of the revolutionaries in his ‘Kesari’ newspaper, naturally earning the ire of the British Raj on several occasions.

By 1997, the Chapekar Wada was practically crumbling and the CSS took up the redevelopment work in 1998 and it was completed in April 2005, at a cost of around Rs 50 lakh with help from the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) and other philanthropists.

It comprises the old dwelling of the Chapekars at Chinchwadgaon, and now the CSS has bought over the adjoining plots to construct a six-storey memorial, museum and other attractions there, said Prabhune.