Aleksandrivska Chapel
The Chapel of St Alexander Nevsky was raised on Sergievska Square in memory of Emperor Alexander II the Liberator, murdered on 1 (13) March 1881 on the embankment of the Catherine Canal in Petersburg by terrorists of the People's Will. The chapel was originally to be placed on Mykolaivska Square; in 1881 ten thousand roubles were raised for its construction and a design competition announced, with the entries grouped by the Kharkov eparchial architect Boris Pokrovsky — the same architect who built the Moskovsky Row. This later supplied the basis for attributing the chapel itself to him, although contemporary sources reported that it was built "from a drawing sent from Petersburg"; the project effectively repeated the Vilna Aleksandrivska chapel of academician Nikolai Chagin of 1865.
The shell was completed in 1885; consecration followed only in 1889. The chapel was a typical tower-form building with a tent roof in the neo-Russian-Byzantine style — originally two storeys, the lower a plinth with a platform around it that recalled Moscow's Lobnoe Mesto. A wide staircase climbed to the main volume; the octagonal roof was crowned with a gilded cross over two arshins (≈1.5 m) bearing the date "1 March 1881." The chapel's pride was an icon of St Alexander Nevsky painted by Grigori Myasoyedov, academician and one of the founders of the Peredvizhniki movement.
Through the early 1900s the chapel was reworked several times: the roof was first re-clad and the assassination date erased, then the stone balustrade was replaced with an iron one, and by the pre-revolutionary years the terrace and staircase had been removed altogether. The press at the time already discussed demolishing the chapel as an obstacle to street traffic. The Bolsheviks carried out the demolition in 1928 — officially to widen the carriageway and make room for a tram line; as with the St Nicholas Cathedral and the Stock Exchange, a religious building disappeared under the cover of a transport project. On the cleared site a captured English tank — a trophy of the Civil War against the foreign interventionists — was placed as a monument; it was later moved to the Historical Museum in the courtyard of the Pokrovskyy Monastery.
