Kharkiv University
Kharkiv University — the third university of the Russian Empire — was established by decree of 24 January 1803; its formal opening took place on 17 January 1805 through the efforts of the educator Vasyl Karazin (1773—1842), secretary of the Main Directorate of Schools in the Ministry of People's Enlightenment. Funds were raised from private donors — landowners and merchants of the Kharkov, Yekaterinoslav and Kherson governorates — and the city gifted the university a tract of land to the north-west of today's Rymarska Street. In 1803 Karazin recruited his former classmate from the Petersburg Mining School, Yevhen Vasilyev, to design the buildings. Vasilyev's first proposal envisaged new corpuses on the university's own grounds (roughly where today's Freedom Square stands), but lack of funds forced its abandonment; the same lands instead became the University Garden — laid out by Vasilyev with Professor F. A. Delyavin (and the imported gardener Zeitler), today's Shevchenko Park. The university itself was given the centrally-located Governor's Palace, built between 1768 and 1777 to a design by Mikhail Tikhmenev — modelled on the slightly earlier palace at Novgorod. Construction of the palace was supervised by A. M. Vilyanov and his pupil P. A. Yaroslavskyy; Vasilyev partially reworked the building for university use, raising the wings to two storeys and linking the corpuses with monumental gates in the early Classical idiom. The main block survives to the present day without significant alterations.
In 1822 the trustee of the Kharkov educational district, Lieutenant-General Yegor Karneyev, proposed that a private chapel of the university be built opposite the main building, dedicated to St Anthony. The foundation was laid on 17 January 1823; the Antoniyivska Church was raised to a design by Professor Vasilyev, with architects Tatishchev, Kalashnikov and Ton assisting in the construction. The church was consecrated on 25 April 1831 by Bishop Vitaly. The iconostasis, in the Doric order, was made by the Kharkov tradesman Aleksandr Lebedev to a design by Tatishchev; two of its four icons — the Saviour and the Mother of God — were painted by the academician Aleksey Venetsianov. The floor was laid in slate slabs in 1851 and replaced with ceramic tiles from the Bergenheim factory in 1900.
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 emergence of Ukrainian studies as a scholarly discipline; later still, Lev Landau began his scientific career here. The Soviets dissolved the university as a unified institution in 1920, splitting it into separate institutes — medical, mathematical, humanities — and only restored its university form in 1933. The name of Karazin was formally returned to the institution in 1999. 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.
