Kharkiv Fortress and Pokrovskyy Monastery
The first Cossack settlers arrived in autumn 1652 — 37 men with 53 families from the Chyhyryn regiment, led by ataman Ivan Vasylovych Krivoshlyk. The land of the Kharkivske gorodyshche then belonged to the Belgorod cathedral's Mykolaiv skit, founded here in 1646. By 1654 two slobodas — Lopan and Kharkiv — had taken shape on the right bank of the Lopan and were folded that autumn into the Chuguiv district; that date is conventionally taken as the city's birth. The Chuguiv voievoda Hryhoriy Speshniov drew the fortress plan, and the first Kharkiv voievoda, Voin Selifontov, arrived in spring 1656 to find a stockaded settlement closer to a fence than a real fortress. Three or four more years of rebuilding turned it into a working frontier outpost of Sloboda Ukraine against Crimean Tatar raids. (The popular figures of "Cossack Kharko" and "Ivan Karkach," still repeated in local literature, only appear in sources from the late 18th century; historians Yevhen Albovskiy, Viktor Yurkevych and the contemporary Volodymyr Maslyychuk consider Krivoshlyk the real founder.)
The fortress was rebuilt several times through the late 17th century. Voievoda Lev Sytyn began the outer rampart in 1669; his successor Osip Korsakov finished it in 1677–1678 — the rampart enclosed Kharkiv from the east, north and south, while the marshy banks of the Netecha guarded the west. Around 1688–1689 the Kharkov colonel Hryhoriy Yerofiyovych Donets-Zakharzhevsky built the Pokrovskyy Church in stone as a domestic chapel on his own estate — fortress-style arcade on the ground floor, a musket-defensive gallery on the second tier, a temple-bastion in the literal sense. On the same yard, in the early 18th century, the church-founder’s son colonel Fedir Donets-Zakharzhevsky built the first stone civic building in Kharkov — a small two-storey house surrounded by a wooden palisade and a ditch. After Fedir’s death the estate passed to colonel Fedir Volodymyrovych Shydlovsky, brigadier of the Sloboda regiments, who substantially expanded the stone house into a two-storey Baroque palace — the largest on the territory of Sloboda Ukraine at the time. In that same palace, on 2 June 1709, on his way to the Battle of Poltava, Emperor Peter I lodged briefly — inspecting the fortress and ordering its enlargement to the north. In 1726 the Belgorod archbishop Yepifaniy Tykhorsky moved the Greek-Latin collegium from Belgorod to Kharkov; field marshal Mykhailo Holitsyn bought the former Shydlovsky estate for 500 roubles, and the very same palace became the home of the newly-founded Pokrovskyy collegium monastery, with the domestic church promoted to cathedral. Between 1729 and the 1740s a full defensive perimeter rose around the complex: the bell tower with cannon-loopholes, a stone wall about six metres tall studded with semi-bastions, and an oval gate-tower; an underground passage to the Lopan was dug in case of Tatar siege. Between 1759 and 1769 Hryhoriy Skovoroda — the “Ukrainian Socrates” — taught at the Kharkov Collegium, which operated on the model of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy but was unusual among religious schools for its broad secular curriculum: alongside theology it taught French and German, mathematics, engineering, artillery and geodesy, with Voltaire and Rousseau among the recommended reading. The first students of Kharkov University, founded in 1805, came out of its halls. The Collegium itself was reorganised as a theological seminary in 1840. In 1896 a new church was consecrated on the monastery grounds — the Ozerianska, designed by the eparchial architect Volodymyr Nemkin: a massive basilica with twelve onion domes in the Byzantine-Russian style, sharply contrasting with the Ukrainian Baroque of the Pokrovskyy Cathedral. The same Nemkin built in 1892, on the monastery grounds at Universitetska Street 4, the Consistory itself — a three-storey classical block on the site of the demolished old Collegium corpus, today the Central State Scientific-Technical Archive of Ukraine — and, in the same campaign, the cell-corpus with refectory and the abbot’s house with the main gates. Through the 18th and 19th centuries the hill remained both the symbol and the spiritual centre of the city, and the Collegium would in time grow into the first institution of higher learning on the Left Bank. With the abolition of the voievoda administration in the 1770s the fortress lost its defensive purpose and was gradually dismantled — nothing remains of the works but the rise of the hill itself.
Of the historical buildings of the monastery complex, the Pokrovskyy Cathedral and Nemkin’s Ozerianska Church survived the centuries that followed. The two-storey palace-collegium that received Peter I and where Skovoroda taught vanished without a trace; the new stone Collegium corpus raised in 1818 under Bishop Pavlo Sabbatovskyi stood until the 1890s, then was demolished in turn to clear ground for Nemkin’s Consistory. The stone wall, the gate-tower and the semi-bastions were dismantled across the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 1850s the eparchial architect Fedir Ivanovych Danilov — the same Danilov who would later design the Sergiivskyy Row and the parade staircase up Sergievska Square — built the cathedral a new refectory; it lay in ruins from the late 1950s and was only restored, close to its original form, in the mid-1990s. In 1922 the Soviets closed the monastery — the monastery library, holding among other early printed books the Ostrog Bible of 1581, the Margarit of John Chrysostom of 1596 and Petro Mohyla’s Trebnik of 1646, was destroyed; the surviving buildings were assigned to a museum, the city archive, warehouses and a military commissariat. The bombing of 1941—1943 destroyed the surrounding fabric, and post-war reconstruction did not restore the historic silhouette. The Pokrovskyy Cathedral itself survived every catastrophe — precisely because its original defensive design made it indestructible — and was returned to the Orthodox Church in 1989. Its new custodian — the Pokrovskyy men’s monastery of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church — has, however, added a fresh layer of loss to a monument of national significance. The domes were first plated in gold; in 2019 the cathedral as a whole was repainted in a bright multicoloured scheme that sits poorly against the disciplined brickwork of Cossack Baroque. The state did not object, and no order has been made for the cathedral to be returned to its original appearance. The 44-metre silhouette still holds the line of the fortress hill, but the face it presents is no longer the one the cathedral wore through its first three centuries.
