Residence of Dmytro Bahaliy in Kharkiv. To be or not to be?
Articles | | 636 | Author: Natalia Merkulova
Collage by Olena Zelenina.
Dmytro Ivanovych Bagaliy. Perhaps the only mayor in the history of Kharkiv who had a pro-Ukrainian position. He considered Kharkiv to be a Ukrainian city, as he wrote in his most famous work, The History of Sloboda Ukraine. He openly spoke about the Russification of Slobozhanshchyna in his scientific works.
His contribution as a historian and public figure to the Ukrainization of Slobozhanshchyna and the development of Ukrainian science and culture is invaluable. And he is underestimated by his contemporaries who are now fighting for their identity.
As rector of Kharkiv University, he advocated teaching in Ukrainian. He was involved in the creation of ethnographic and art museums in Kharkiv, in the construction of a new building for the Kharkiv Public Library (now the V.G. Korolenko Kharkiv State Scientific and Pedagogical Library) and the replenishment of its collection with Ukrainian books, and in the opening of the first Ukrainian gymnasium in Kharkiv.
Kharkiv residents gratefully immortalized Dmytro Bahalii's memory by erecting a monument in his honor near the Northern Building of the Kharkiv National University, naming a street in Kharkiv, and erecting a memorial plaque on the house where he lived and worked.
However, despite Dmytro Bahalii's enormous scientific heritage of more than 600 works and his titanic work as a historian and educational organizer, his figure is remembered only during memorable dates and celebrations.
Iryna Honcharova-Bahalii, the great-great-granddaughter of Dmytro Bahalii, wants to make the memory of her outstanding great-great-grandfather permanent, alive, and active, and to bring his famous figure back into the contemporary space of Kharkiv.
She has an idea to create a residence of Dmytro Bagaliy in Kharkiv, in the house where he lived and where she lives now.
In a conversation with Iryna Honcharova-Bahaliy, we will talk about the unique Bagaliy house, which has miraculously survived nationalization, privatization, and wars, the purpose of the residence, and what stands in the way of its creation.
Read more in the Ukrainian edition....
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