[club1543502|Goldberg and the Three Saints Church.5 photos

Grigory Golberg was a very wealthy and prominent merchant. In order to become the chairman of the Kharkov merchants’ association, he converted to Orthodox Christianity and donated a substantial amount of money to build the Three Saints Church. However, there is another, more interesting and romantic version of how this church came into existence. Golberg fell in love with a girl named Maria, whose land was later used to build the church. Grigory proposed to Maria, but she gave him an ultimatum: he had to be baptized. He did so and also persuaded his two brothers, Ivan and Vasily, to convert to Orthodox Christianity as well. Coincidentally, the names of the brothers during their baptism matched those of the saints in the Russian Orthodox Church, which inspired Grigory to build the Three Saints Church. The metropolitan agreed to the construction, and Maria donated the land for the project. Between 1907 and 1915, the church was built under the supervision of the experienced architect Lovtsov. However, Lovtsov died shortly after the foundation was laid, and his work was continued by another talented architect, V. N. Pokrovsky. Being a innovator himself, Pokrovsky carefully preserved the designs of his predecessor. For the interior paintings, the famous St. Petersburg artist Aleksey Yakovlevich Sokolov was hired. He had studied at the Academy of Arts under the guidance of I. E. Repin and V. A. Serov. The solemn consecration ceremony of the Three Saints Church, which was largely completed by the end of 1914, took place on May 29, 1915. The church could accommodate up to 650 people at once, and approximately 2 million bricks were used in its construction. The total cost amounted to 200,000 rubles at that time. Interestingly, the six-pointed stars found in the medallions on the church walls are a common motif in traditional church art. In Kharkov, however, they are associated with Grigory Golberg, a Jew who converted to Orthodox Christianity. Address: Kharkov, 1st Army Street, 103. Source: vk.com/old_kharkov #Kharkov #History_of_Kharkov #Moskalevka