Buildings change and are renovated, but the elusive spirit of their original purpose remains.
Perhaps the mind fills in the missing elements based on the proportions. Take, for example, the National Guard building at Seminarska Street, 22–24. It was originally built as an almshouse for the Kharkiv Burgher Society by diocesan architect Vladimir Nemkin in 1885 (according to other sources, in 1883).
Magnate Ivan Kharitonenko made a donation for its opening. The almshouse housed 36 men and 55 women. In 1889, a children’s shelter was opened there (for 12 boys and 12 girls). In 1889, a house chapel dedicated to the Icon of the Most Holy Mother of God, “Joy of All Who Sorrow,” was established.
In 1893, it was a parish school. As you can see in this pre-WWI photo, the central part of the building was topped with domes; now that they’re gone, it feels as though something is missing architecturally in that section of the building.
Some of the sculpted decoration has also been lost. I think there used to be an icon in the empty niche. Perhaps it would be a good idea to fill it with something (even just a unit’s coat of arms or emblem).
In February 2022, the building was severely damaged in a Russian missile strike.
Nevertheless, there had never been a parish church in this part of the city. It was consecrated only at the end of 1917 in honor of the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God and became the last pre-revolutionary church in Kharkiv. It was located roughly at Seminarska Street, 92.
The main patron of the construction was N. Shuvakov, and the architect was P. Tolkachev. It was closed in 1936 and dismantled by 1940. Priests Andrei Butsikin and Ioann Butsikin were executed in 1937. During the war, services resumed in the surviving sexton’s lodge. The last priest, Alexander Rybalov, died in a Lviv prison in 1959.
A church reappeared in this neighborhood in 2014, when the congregation dedicated to the Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God leased a small former seminary building from the Ministry of Defense (in Soviet times it was the medical unit of a flight school).
The church is located at Seminarska Street, 46, Building 2. It was planned that the church will have two levels: the upper level dedicated to the Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God…
…and the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God (lower)
The church is named after the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God, in honor of the same church that was destroyed in the 1930s mentioned above.
The church was damaged as a result of an attack by Russian forces on the night of March 16–17, 2022. The church’s roof was destroyed, its windows and doors were shattered, and its religious artifacts were damaged.
