Panorama
The Panorama pavilion was built on Sergievska Square in 1908 as a purpose-built rotunda for the touring Golgotha panorama. Numerous versions of this spectacle (estimates put the number at 15 to 40) had been touring Europe for over twenty years; "our" version had spent a year and a half in Kyiv and then Odesa before reaching Kharkov in 1908. Some sources attribute the pavilion to academician Oleksiy Beketov, though no documentary confirmation has been published. Inside: a large circular genre painting of the Crucifixion, with plaster figures, artificial trees and a sandy floor in the foreground.
First-season interest faded quickly, and within a year the commercial project was in trouble with takings. The city — the pavilion was municipal property — followed the path of other cities that had built such structures, and invited a different panorama. In 1909 the work of the Polish painter Jan Styka, "The Martyrdom of the Christians in Nero's Circus" — part of his cycle of illustrations to Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis, a long-running success in Europe, Warsaw and Odesa — was brought in. Its Kharkov run, too, was short.
In 1911 the pavilion, by then empty for two years, was leased for ten years by a company of local engineers — for a "grand skating rink in the foreign manner," with a luxurious buffet, dressing rooms, salons and full electric lighting, at a projected cost of some 30,000 roubles. The skating rink also failed to last; in 1915 the building was refitted as the people's cinema "Mayak." The Mayak continued to operate after the revolution; the pavilion did not survive the bombings of 1941–1943 and was not rebuilt.
