Panorama
A Nativity spectacle — the Hill's pilgrim tradition.
The Golgotha and Vertep Panorama appeared in Kharkiv in the 1880s as a circular, life-size diorama depicting the crucifixion of Christ on Golgotha and the Nativity scene. It was housed in a purpose-built rotunda pavilion in the University Garden, lit by gas burners and a glazed lantern in the roof. Such panoramas were then a popular form of public entertainment across Europe — magic-lantern shows ran in London, Vienna and Berlin, while in the Russian Empire the panoramas of Aivazovsky and Rubo enjoyed a success rivalling the theatres'.
The Kharkiv panorama was a touring project — brought in by Odesa entrepreneurs who had bought the rights to display it in several cities of the Empire's south. A canvas roughly thirty metres in diameter and eight metres tall was painted by a group of local icon-painters under the direction of an academy-trained guest artist; the foreground was enriched with plaster figures, artificial trees and a floor partly covered with sand. Admission cost a few kopecks, but the immersive effect produced a strong religious impression on the viewer — a Kharkiv gymnasium pupil's diary of the time records 'an acute fear of the cross suddenly hanging right above one's head'.
By the early 20th century interest in panoramas was fading: they were displaced by the cinematograph, which offered motion and dynamism instead of a static spectacle. The pavilion found a second life — in 1915 it was refitted as the people's cinema "Mayak," no longer running religious tableaux but the popular films of the day. The structure itself had been built for temporary use, though, and the timber frame could not endure for decades. The 1917 revolution and the Civil War put a final end both to public religious attractions and to the Mayak; the Golgotha canvas disappeared in the general chaos of those years. Like most temporary spectacles of its era, the Kharkiv panorama did not survive the upheavals of the early 20th century — surviving traces are limited to a few advertising notices in the press and souvenir photographs of schoolboys posing in front of the round pavilion.
