Sergiivska Square
The mercantile heart of the Hill — the square framed by the Sergiivskyy Row.
Sergiivska Square took its present shape only after 1835. Before then the site held the Lopansky Bazaar, an organised market established in 1765 just east of the Lopanska watch-tower, with fish-rows and wooden stalls for small trades — and from those rows the square took its first name, Bazaar Square. The great fire of 1835 ended the bazaar; on the cleared ground two-storey masonry trading rows went up, and by the mid-19th century the Sergiivskyy Rows had risen by the Merchants' Descent, giving the square its new name — Sergiivska, in honour of general-governor Sergey Aleksandrovich Kokoshkin.
By the late 19th century the square had become a mirror of the Hill's bourgeois life: the Sergiivskyy and Novo-Sergiivskyy Rows lined its edges, haberdashers' stalls and cafés displayed their goods to the cobblestones, and weekend markets transformed the plaza into a fairground for travelling theatre troupes and carousels. Gas lamps appeared in the 1880s; by the early 20th century an electric chandelier-arch was strung across the centre.
When the Soviets relocated the capital of the Ukrainian SSR to Kharkiv in 1919, they began reshaping the city centre to a modernist agenda. In the mid-1930s the trading rows were demolished, and in 1932 the square itself was renamed Proletarska. The move of the capital to Kyiv in 1934 stripped it of central attention and it faded; post-war construction never restored its historical silhouette. The historic name Sergiivska Square was only restored in 2016.
