Kontraktova Square

For a few weeks each winter, merchants from across the empire crowded onto this square in Podil to settle the year’s business — grain, sugar, loans and whole harvests traded on a signature. The contracts they struck here gave the place its name, and it has answered to it ever since: Kontraktova, the Square of Contracts.

It looks like nowhere else in central Kyiv. There is no Soviet monumental sweep here, none of the Khreshchatyk grandeur — just low 19th-century arcades, cobblestones and plane trees, and the air of an old European market town left standing. It is the obvious place to begin a day in Podil, and one of the few squares worth turning up to with no plan at all.

The market that outlived the Upper Town

Podil was doing business here long before the contracts. Under Kyivan Rus this low ground below the Upper Town was the city’s craft and trade quarter, and chroniclers called the spot simply the ‘Torhovyshche’, the marketplace. When the Mongol invasion of the 13th century wrecked the fortified Upper Town, Kyiv’s public life moved downhill for good, and this square became its stage.

The fair came later, and from elsewhere. In the late 1790s the great contract fair was transferred here from the Volhynian town of Dubno by imperial decree, and every February, around Candlemas, Podil filled with landowners, financiers and traders bargaining over the year ahead. Their permanent home was the Contracts House of 1815–1817, by the English architect William Hastie — where deals were signed and, between sessions, concerts played. Balzac sat in that hall, as did Pushkin, Gogol and Shevchenko.

Then came 1811. On 9 July a fire broke out in Podil and burned for three days, taking more than 2,000 houses, a dozen churches and three monasteries. The district was rebuilt from nothing on a strict grid drawn up by Hastie and the city architect Andriy Melensky — and it is their plan, not anything medieval, that gives the square its calm shape today. The name has changed more than once: Oleksandrivska under the tsars, Red Square under the Soviets, Kontraktova again only in 1990.

Hostynny Dvir and the Samson fountain

The long arcaded building down one side of the square is the Hostynny Dvir, the merchants’ court. Luigi Rusca designed it in 1809 as a two-storey arcade, but the fire and a lack of money left it a single storey for most of its life — traders raised their own attics over their stalls for a second floor. Soviet planners knocked it down; in the 1980s it was rebuilt to Rusca’s original two-storey plan, though how faithful the result is remains disputed.

In front of it plays the Samson fountain, among the oldest waterworks in Kyiv. The domed rotunda dates to 1748–49, the work of the Podil-born architect Ivan Hryhorovych-Barskyi; the figure that gave it its name — Samson prising open a lion’s jaws, with water once spouting from them — came afterwards. The Bolsheviks tore it down in 1934. What stands now went up in the early 1980s, rebuilt in its old form for the celebrations of Kyiv’s 1500th anniversary in 1982.

Skovoroda’s hidden Bible

The bronze figure mid-square, hands clasped behind his back, is Hryhorii Skovoroda — wandering philosopher and poet, later called the Ukrainian Socrates. He faces the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, where he studied in the 1730s and 40s before taking to the road for the rest of his life. Ivan Kavaleridze sculpted him in the mid-1970s, at the age of 89.

Look closely and there is a Bible in his knapsack, tucked out of sight on purpose. Kavaleridze first modelled him holding the book openly; the Soviet authorities would not have a free-thinker brandishing scripture in public, and so, the story goes, it was tucked into the bag over his shoulder, where it stayed. Behind him rise the buildings of the Mohyla Academy — founded in the early 17th century, among the oldest universities in Eastern Europe, refounded as a modern one in 1991 — still setting the intellectual tone of the square.

Getting there, and into Podil

The metro runs straight under the square: the Kontraktova Ploshcha station on the blue line surfaces right into it, so you step off the escalator already among the landmarks. Most of the square has been pedestrian since 2017, and the warm months bring fairs, festivals and street musicians.

Give Podil more time than the square alone asks for. Ten minutes’ walk away is the foot of Andriivsky Descent, the steep cobbled street often called Kyiv’s Montmartre, climbing past galleries to the blue-and-gold St Andrew’s Church at the top. Come in the morning, when the light lies clean on the façades and the crowds are thin, and leave room for coffee. One last game: somewhere on the Contracts House wall hides a coin-sized bronze miniature from the city’s ‘Shukai’ project, and finding it is supposed to bring luck.