Panorama
The Panorama pavilion was built on Sergiivska Square in 1904 as a purpose-built domed pavilion for the touring Golgotha panorama, and was consecrated on 18 December 1904. Numerous versions of this spectacle (estimates put the number at 15 to 40) had been touring Europe for over twenty years. 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 Kharkiv 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; in the 1930s the pavilion was dismantled during the reconstruction of the Lopan embankment.
