Sergiivskyy Row
A trading row on Sergiivska Square.
The Sergiivskyy Row — a two-storey masonry trading gallery on Sergiivska Square — rose in the mid-19th century on the burned-out footprint of the Lopansky Bazaar, which the great fire of 1835 had destroyed. An arcade on the ground floor held a vault under which the shops opened; the second storey housed the merchants' apartments and stockrooms. The building was raised on donations from the Kharkiv merchantry, which moved up from the temporary wooden stalls of the old bazaar wanting a permanent trading address beside the temple.
The Sergiivskyy Row reached its peak in the 1860s—1900s: cloth from Łódź and Moscow was traded here, tea routed through the Nizhny Novgorod fairs, chinaware, church candles, lamp oil, threads and haberdashery. Crowds flowed in from across Sloboda Ukraine for the fairs and the patronal feasts; the shops opened at six in the morning, and the square lived on under gas lamps in the evening. The row was one of the principal hubs of bourgeois commerce on the Hill and a symbol of Kharkiv's merchant culture on the eve of the revolution.
The Soviets nationalised the row in 1919 and used the building as warehouses and offices. In the mid-1930s, during the campaign to reshape the centre and abolish the private sector, the row was demolished — replaced by a public garden where the citizens of the new Ukrainian SSR capital were meant to gather. The move of the capital to Kyiv in 1934 stripped the centre of attention for good; what little remained around the square was finished off by the bombings of 1941—1943. The Sergiivskyy Row survives only on Kharkiv photo-archive plates and the city archive's blueprints.
