From the author

I'm Serge. I grew up in Kharkiv, and from the time I was a child I was drawn to the city's older self — the Kharkiv that lived in my grandparents' photographs, in library books, on postcards I traded with classmates. I started collecting old pictures before I really understood why.

I kept reading. I wrote to historians, to museum staff, to ordinary Kharkivites who carried stories nobody had written down. A quiet picture took shape — of an early-twentieth-century Kharkiv that had been the cultural capital of a country that did not yet officially exist, and of how much of it had been deliberately dismantled. First by Soviet planners, then by war, and now, every day, by Russian missiles.

I wanted to bring that Kharkiv back, at least in pixels. For every important building on University Hill I gathered the archival material — photographs, period maps, survey drawings, postcards — and pulled it together as a visual brief. From those references a 3D artist from Kharkiv has, over many months, modelled each building and placed it back where it once stood. This is the project I have been thinking about for a long time. Thank you for being here.

This site is the beginning of a conversation — with our community and with the world — not a recipe. Some details will be off, some parts unfinished, and bugs will surface. Read it with patience, and write in if you know how to make it more accurate. The work continues.