Sergiivskyy Row
The Sergiivskyy Row was raised in 1850 on the site of the Lopansky Bazaar, which the great fire of 1835 had destroyed. The architect was Fedor Danilov; the contractor — the Graivoron merchant of the second guild Andrian Kuzmich Lukin — completed the work at a cost to the city treasury of 7,500 silver roubles. The initial 15 shops were leased at 175 roubles a year each; the merchants built stone storerooms behind them at their own expense. The name — for the rows and for the square itself — came from General-Governor Sergei Aleksandrovich Kokoshkin, who in the 1850s entirely transformed Kharkov's commerce by relocating its wholesale arm across the Lopan.
On 31 March 1866 fire destroyed the shops on Sergievska Square. The worst-hit was the first-guild merchant Nikolay Serikov, whose two shops stood on the same line as the city stalls, effectively linking the two squares. That same year the city architect Boris Semyonovich Pokrovsky drew up plans for new two-storey municipal shops; a new block of thirteen shops was completed by 10 August 1866. Through the rest of the 19th century the row remained one of the principal trading hubs of the Hill.
At the end of the 19th century the Sergiivskyy Row burned again. In 1890 the Nikolaevsky Row was built on the same site to a design by the architect Aleksandr Shpigel — and it is that successor structure that comes down to us in the pre-revolutionary photographs. The name "Sergiivskyy Row" — a record of half a century of commercial life — has lived on in the history of the city, denoting not one building but a whole dynasty of shops that succeeded one another on the same plot. The last of them, the Nikolaevsky Row, stood into the post-war years and was not rebuilt.
