University
The cradle of Kharkiv's scientific thought.
The University of Kharkiv — the third in the Russian Empire — was founded in 1804 by the educator Vasyl Karazin in the former Governor-General's Palace, built in 1777 to a design by Kharkiv architect Petro Yaroslavskyy. Emperor Alexander I's commissioners came to the opening, and the first four faculties — letters, physics and mathematics, medicine and moral philosophy — began teaching that same year. The university was an immediate magnet for all of Sloboda Ukraine: merchants and gentry donated land and libraries, and Karazin himself handed most of his fortune to the cause.
Through the 19th century the University of Kharkiv flourished as the principal academic core of left-bank Ukraine: lectures by Izmail Sreznevskyy, Mykola Kostomarov and Oleksandr Potebnja shaped the very emergence of Ukrainian studies as a scientific discipline. The university gave the country the mathematician Mykhailo Ostrohradskyy, the physiologist Illia Mechnikov, the historian Dmytro Bahalii, and later Lev Landau, who began his career here. The university library, botanical garden and astronomical observatory turned Sumska Street into the educational artery of the city.
After making Kharkiv the Ukrainian SSR's capital, the Soviets liquidated the university in 1920, breaking it into separate institutes — medical, mathematical, humanities; the Karazin name was only restored after the Second World War. The bombing of 1941—1943 destroyed the main building and the library holdings, but the university held on and resumed work as soon as the city was liberated. Today the V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University — one of the oldest in Europe — continues to operate despite the constant threat of fresh missile strikes on the city.
