Fur Row
The fur market — heart of the city's mercantile life.
The Fur Row specialised in pelts and rose in the first half of the 19th century on the southern flank of the Hill. Merchants from Siberia, Yakutia and Arkhangelsk Governorate brought sable, fox, arctic fox, bear and wolf hides, while Kharkiv artisans tailored fur coats, sheepskins, capes, muffs and hats for all of Sloboda Ukraine. The row's building — a two-storey masonry block with stout vaulted cellars for storing pelts — was tuned to the trade's climatic needs: thick walls and shaded shops kept the cool even in summer.
The Fur Row peaked in the 1850s—1890s, when one of the main routes for fur exports out of the Russian Empire ran through Kharkiv south to Odesa, Constantinople and beyond. In winter Sergiivska Square would be wrapped in the smell of tanning and the red glow of candles in the shop windows: the merchants ran auctions that drew bidders from Moscow, Warsaw and Kyiv. Next to the shops worked tailors and furriers; the most expensive commissions were served in private salons hung with Persian carpets.
The First World War cut the trade routes, the 1917 revolution stripped the merchants of capital, and nationalisation in 1919 turned the row into a Red Cross warehouse and orphanage. The mid-1930s Soviet rebuilding of the centre erased the Fur Row alongside the Sergiivskyy and Novo-Sergiivskyy; the move of the capital to Kyiv in 1934 stripped Kharkiv of interest in its own heritage. The bombings of 1941—1943 destroyed what was left; post-war construction left not even the foundations. Sloboda Ukraine's fur trade vanished together with this building.
