St. Nicholas Cathedral
The first St Nicholas Church appeared on Mykolaivska Square at the same time as the founding of Kharkov — no later than 1655 — as a wooden Cossack chapel pressed against the wall of the Kharkov fortress; in 1709, while passing through Kharkov during the Northern War, Emperor Peter I attended a liturgy in the chapel. In 1733 the wooden church was destroyed by fire; between 1764 and 1770 a new stone church went up on the same site in the Cossack Baroque manner — three tiers, a three-part plan with an octagonal centre and hexagonal altar and narthex. Contemporaries counted it among Kharkov’s finest examples of the style — a close architectural cousin of the Pokrovskyy Cathedral of 1689 still standing on the hill, which a line of Kharkov researchers believes was specifically pointed out to the St Nicholas mason as the model to follow. Between 1833 and 1835 a pseudo-Gothic refectory was added; soon after, Emperor Nicholas I, passing through Kharkov, ordered the old bell tower torn down on the grounds that it was impeding traffic, and a new one raised in the Russian-Byzantine style.
By the mid-1880s the old church had deteriorated, and in 1886 it was dismantled; on its site the Kharkov eparchial architect Vladimir Nemkin began construction of a new stone cathedral in 1887. Completed in 1896, the new St Nicholas Cathedral — a massive five-domed Byzantine-style building — became the principal architectural anchor of governorate Mykolaivska Square, alongside Mikhailovsky’s classical Stock Exchange and the Nobility Assembly that shared the square with it. In June 1919, when the Volunteer Army took Kharkov, a thanksgiving service was held in the cathedral and the square in front of it, attended by General Anton Denikin, commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of South Russia.
In 1930, by resolution of the Kharkov City Council of 17 February, the cathedral was marked for demolition — officially because of a new tram line turning from the square onto Pushkin Street (a tram line that lasted until 2008). Unlike the neighbouring Myronosytska Church, which was scheduled for dynamiting to make room for the Opera Theatre, St Nicholas Cathedral was taken down by dismantling; the brick and rubble were reassigned by the council to the construction of seven-year schools. The square, renamed for the revolutionary M. Tevelev, lost its spiritual anchor before the bombings of 1941–1943 ever reached the centre, leaving no material trace behind. Today the cathedral’s site is the pedestrian part of Constitution Square.
