Turn-of-the-century Kyiv landmarks recall an era of prosperity and proportionality in design
“If I could travel in time, I would choose to live a while in the early 1900s in Kyiv” – a Kyiv which writer Mikhail Bulgakov lovingly described in his novel “White Guard” as “a wonderful town, a happy town.”
My great-aunt Vera Lypnytska was born in 1914. She remembers a bit of this same pre-revolutionary Kyiv: a brightly lit opera house, elegant horse-drawn carriages and a few shiny black automobiles with loud horns. She also remembers the mysterious hustle behind the plush curtains backstage, where her father, a stage director, often took her. Sunday promenades on Khreshchatyk Street where, following an unwritten law, the nobility kept to the right side of the street and the new Bessarabska Market. Commoners kept to the left side, with the beautiful city council building as a backdrop. Though they never mixed, nobody felt inconvenienced.
Different view of history
“Kyiv was different back then,” great-aunt Vera said. “Until the 1940s it had more of a family feeling. People were happier and more attentive to each other and to their city.”
Today walking around Kyiv and looking at the buildings, one can still catch a glimpse of that bygone time. Many of the buildings in Kyiv’s city center date to that boom time when cinema, telephones, electricity and even airplanes quickly became part of life. The miseries of World War I and the Bolshevik revolution were yet to be.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, Kyiv went through a construction boom. Within a decade of the development of the sugar industry, Kyiv turned from a provincial town into the “sugar capital” of the Russian Empire.
“This is my favorite period – the turn of the 20th century,” said Kyiv historian and researcher Mykhailo Kalnytsky. “It was the period of Kyiv’s biggest flourish since the times of Kyivan Rus.”
On some of the most curious of Kyiv’s buildings one can notice a bronze plate identifying it as an architectural or historical monument. Going beyond the scant information provided on the plaques there are the life stories, intrigues and dramas of Kyiv’s past. “Juicy meat on the bones of history,” as Kyiv historian Vladislava Osmak of the One Street Museum put it.
In proper proportions
“Early 20th century Kyiv was eclectic and contradictory: backward in the outskirts and ultra-modern in the center, with electric lampposts, carriages on new inflatable tires and shops gleaming with commercial products,” Osmak began, “even as a rapidly developing industrial city, Kyiv remained cozy and, I would say, proportional to its people.”
New buildings and streets, such as the Polytechnic institute or Kadetske Highway (today’s Povitroflotsky Prospect) were huge for their time but retained their beauty, charm and tranquility.
Take the quarter behind St. Sofia – Striletska and Reitarska streets and Yaroslaviv Val, Osmak suggests. She takes note of the correlation of scale to size, the width of the streets and sidewalks, and the height of the facades. The streets are not wide, it is not distressing to cross them, and yet you don’t feel confined.
Osmak claims that this effect is reached by smart partitioning of the facades using windows, decorations, and a special way of painting.
Two buildings side by side are rarely painted in the same color, but still it didn’t look gaudy. Bright buildings such as the Leipzig Hotel (on the corner of Volodymyrska and Prorizna streets) were quite rare.
“Today, [post-Soviet] Kyiv is a bit kitschy, in a style of a newly rich Gypsy,” Osmak said. “It’s never been like this. Kyiv was first of all comfortable.”
One can easily imagine the early 20th century Kyiv by walking down Honchara Street – long and hilly, punctuated by small yards, parks and fountains. First called Malo-volodymyrska, the street connected the upper city with the big Jewish market at today’s Peremohy Square. The street’s upper part was built in the 1830s, but the rest was populated extremely slowly over time, as it passed through the site of a former dump.
Up to the late 19th century the city was comprised of one- or two-story houses, most made of wood. To imagine how it could have looked, consider a few of the wooden buildings that remain in Kyiv: the Andriyivska Church warden’s home at Andriyivsky Uzviz 19; the Russian-style house, part of the former city water pump, on Naberezhne Shosse 4; or the house where poet Taras Shevchenko lived as an art student on Shevchenka Provulok 8A.
But soon these houses were replaced by four- to six-story giants, mostly houses for rent, designed by the city’s most prominent architects: Volodymyr Nikolayev, Petro Alyoshyn and Oleksandr Kobelev.
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| One of Kyiv’s best examples of the art nouveau style is a gray house at Honchara 33. Overgrown with ivy, it sports gargoyles on its roof and a sculpture of a lion, which bares its teeth to passers-by (Natalia Kravchuk) |
Exemplary qualities
One of Kyiv’s best examples of the art nouveau style is a gray house at Honchara 33. Overgrown with ivy, it sports gargoyles on its roof and a sculpture of a lion, which bares its teeth to passers-by. Some of the details – an arch leading to the backyard and its ornate gates – are copies of a renowned example of art nouveau architecture, Beranger’s House in Paris.
The house by celebrated architect Georgy Ledokhovsky is both an architectural and historical monument. It was built in 1907 as a residence and clinic for Dr. Petro Kachkovsky, an assistant professor at St. Volodymyr University, who was also the consultant for Kyiv’s Hospital for Unskilled Laborers and the Free Hospital for Children. The next year, Kachkovsky opened a surgery and eye clinic, which was soon bought by the Makovsky family.
According to Vasyl Doguzov, a consultant at the Museum of Medicine, neither Kachkovsky or Makovsky were considered famous among Kyiv doctors, but the Kachkovsky house was.
In 1911, a mortally wounded Pyotr Stolypin – the Russian Empire’s Interior Minister and the initiator of a severe agrarian reform – died in Makovsky’s hospital.
After the revolution, the clinic was turned into a research institute for labor hygiene and occupational diseases. Today the building houses one of the offices of the Rukh party.
Another notable building, an architectural ensemble erected in 1908, is at Honchara 60. The seven-story neo-gothic building stands on a hill just off the street. Decorated with gables and pinnacles on the roof, it looks like a medieval fortress, surrounded by a wall with a gate and a round watchtower (the former caretaker’s house). Reaching the entrance requires climbing the stairs and crossing over a bridge.
“In the early 1900s, the neo-styles and stylistic mixture was extremely fashionable in Kyiv,” Osmak commented. “Another example of neo-gothic is Richard’s Castle on Andriyivsky Uzviz.”
Addressing the past
Honchara 60 was a house for rent, and it remains a residential building to this day. It had two flats on each floor, each containing seven rooms, with exquisite wallpaper, oak parquet floors and painted ceilings. It even boasted such state-of-the-art amenities as two elevators. The housekeeping units for ice storage, laundry and animal barns were masterfully hidden, their collective roof serving as a front yard and garden for the house’s inhabitants.
Honchara 60 belonged to Dr. Mykhailo Lapynsky. The 1914 Kyiv address directory identifies Lapynsky as head of the “nerve and spirit diseases clinic” of Aleksandrovska Hospital. The directory also contains an ad of Lapynsky’s health center: “Water and light therapy, electric therapy. 50 separate rooms.”
But according to Doguzov, Lapynsky wasn’t famous for his medical achievements. He entered Kyiv history as a real estate owner, which was not unusual for the time.
“The early 20th century enabled Kyiv’s medical science to flourish,” Doguzov explained. “The doctors were well-off and respected citizens, and many of them owned real estate.”
Today, the house is an architectural monument recognized by the city. The Code of Architectural Monuments calls it “a unique phenomenon for a regular residential building in the early 20th century of Kyiv.”
