In the autumn of 1615 a Kyiv noblewoman, Halshka Hulevychivna, signed her estate on Podil over to the city’s Orthodox brotherhood on one condition: part of it had to become a school open to children of any rank. That deed of gift is the founding document of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, one of the oldest seats of higher learning in Eastern Europe.
It has never traded on grandeur — no marble staircases, no triumphal colonnades, only quiet courtyards and the baroque cupola of the Old Academy riding above the tiled roofs. It rose, was banned outright under the Russian empire, and came back to life in 1991 with the independent state.
The Kyiv Brotherhood School that grew from that gift was taken under the protection of the Zaporozhian Host, and the hetman Petro Sahaidachny left it money before his death in 1622. It answered a real need: in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Orthodox youth had no equal to the Catholic and Jesuit colleges — nowhere to get a serious education without giving up their faith. That gap is why Ukrainians still date the academy to 1615.
The century and a half that followed was its ascent. Students worked through rhetoric, poetics, philosophy and theology in Latin, Greek, Polish and Church Slavonic; a full course could run close to twelve years.
The name comes from Petro Mohyla, born in 1596 into a noble Moldavian family and, from 1633, Metropolitan of Kyiv. As archimandrite of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra he opened his own school there around 1631, then merged it a year later with the brotherhood school; the combined collegium took his name.
Mohyla ran it like a reformer. He modelled the curriculum on the best European colleges of the day, the Jesuit ones included, built a graded ladder of classes, stocked the library, kept the press busy and sent his ablest pupils abroad. Full academy status came only later, by hetman and tsar charters after his death — but the shape of the place was his.
The empire ended its first life. After Kharkiv University opened in 1805 the Kyiv school lost its primacy, and in 1817 Tsar Alexander I closed it; two years later its buildings passed to the church as the Kyiv Theological Academy. The secular tradition went quiet for almost two centuries.
Its second life came with the country’s. The academy was revived on its old Podil ground in the autumn of 1991, driven by the literary scholar Vyacheslav Bryukhovetsky, its first president. The first students matriculated on 24 August 1992 — the first anniversary of independence, almost to the day. Teaching now runs in Ukrainian and English.
The campus spreads between Kontraktova Square and the Dnipro slopes, some nine buildings in all; its heart is the Old Academy, known just as often as the Mazepa building. The brick ground floor went up in 1703–04 with money from Hetman Ivan Mazepa, himself a graduate; in 1739 Metropolitan Raphael Zaborovsky and the architect Johann Gottfried Schädel raised a second storey and added the Congregation Hall.
Open galleries run along the courtyard side; the high roof breaks into a slender, lantern-topped cupola. The Congregation Hall, once hung with busts of philosophers and portraits of the academy’s luminaries, still hosts forums and concerts. There is an irony in it: the building keeps Mazepa’s name even though the church later placed him under anathema — a quiet nod to the man whose money paid for it.
Four centuries have sent a remarkable roster through these walls. The hetmans Ivan Vyhovsky, Ivan Mazepa and Pavlo Polubotok studied here; so did Pylyp Orlyk, whose 1710 Constitution — drafted in exile at Bender — ranks among the earliest of its kind. The theologian Feofan Prokopovych taught here, the composer Maksym Berezovsky trained here, and most celebrated of all is the wandering philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda.
The university still calls its students ‘spudei’, a word it borrowed from Latin and Greek four centuries ago and never gave up — a thread of language running from the 1600s to today’s undergraduates.
It’s an easy place to reach. The blue metro line stops at Kontraktova Ploshcha, a few minutes’ walk from the main buildings at vul. Skovorody 2; in warm weather you can walk down from the Andriivsky Descent. Kontraktova Square itself is one of the oldest in Kyiv, named for the trade ‘contracts’ once struck at its fairs.
The square is an open-air museum: the arcades of the Hostynyi Dvir recall the district’s merchant past, and nearby stand monuments to Sahaidachny and Skovoroda, the legend-wrapped Samson fountain, and the rebuilt Pyrohoshcha church, named in the medieval ‘Tale of Igor’s Campaign’. The Podil around the academy is a tangle of lanes and cafés made for a slow walk.
Справжня праматір освіти України, дуже класний заклад. Основний корпус красивий, усе охайне й доглянуте. Площа перед входом теж чудова, особливо коли там збираються студенти Могилянки. Є цікаві локації та різні творчі плюшки, а ще це місце, де студенти можуть розслабитися просто перед деканатом, показуючи вільний дух цього вишу.
Поєднання історії та сучасності в одному просторі! Університет національного масштабу в найширшому сенсі цього слова!
Чудовий освітній заклад України! Сучасні методи навчання та дуже сильний педагогічний колектив академії.
