Uspenskyy Cathedral
The first Uspenskyy church rose on the hill as early as 1657 — a single-altar wooden temple about 6 × 6 metres, raised from "fresh red timber" by the military people of the first Kharkov voivode Voin Selifontov. About 25 sazhens to the north, between 1685 and 1687, the acting colonel Avdiy Grigoryevich Donets built the first stone cathedral — a five-domed cruciform structure consecrated by Metropolitan Avraamy in 1686; the old wooden church was then dismantled. The fire of 1733 destroyed all the wooden parts and the interior; cracks in the walls forced the dismantling of Donets's building in 1770. The cathedral that stands today was built between 1771 and 1777 on the same hilltop — its five-domed silhouette forming the visual anchor of the centre alongside the Pokrovskyy Monastery.
Between 1821 and 1844 the Aleksandrivska Bell Tower was added in commemoration of the victory over Napoleon — the principal work of Professor of Architecture Yevhen Vasilyev, the same architect who raised the university's Antoniyivska Church and the Nobility Assembly. Its 89 metres made it the tallest structure in the Russian Empire of its day, and the tallest landmark in Kharkov, visible for tens of versts beyond the city limits — in Ukraine its height yields only to the Great Lavra Bell Tower in Kyiv, though Aleksandrivska's silhouette is considerably more slender. Its foundation reaches ten metres into the ground, the walls at the base are six metres thick, and the main bell weighs more than sixteen tonnes. Vasilyev did not live to see it finished: in autumn 1832, Emperor Nicholas I, on an inspection of the university church, found a small crack in a wall and ordered the architect dismissed from service without a pension. The sixty-year-old professor, who had given Kharkov and the university thirty years of his life, did not survive the disgrace — he lay sick for three months and died, leaving a wife and six children without means.
The Soviets closed the cathedral for worship in 1929, took down the bells and converted the building into the Ukrainian SSR's radio centre; broadcasting masts were mounted on the bell tower. The iconostasis, the work of Rastrelli, was carefully dismantled and removed to a museum's storage rooms, where it later burned during the war. The bombings of 1941—1943 heavily damaged the cupolas and roof, but the massive brick structure held; the cathedral continued to serve the radio centre through the post-war Soviet decades. Returned to the Church in the 1990s and gradually restored, today it is one of the city's principal places of worship — and the only structure on Cathedral Square that still holds its historic silhouette.
