Citadel of European Spirit and Ukrainian Enlightenment
The Kyiv-Mohyla Academy’s history starts in October 1615 when Halshka (Elisabeth) Hulevychivna, a Volyn-born noblewoman of Kyiv, signed thefundush certificate, reading, “I the undersigned donate all this to St. Basil’s cloistered community and to a school for children of noble birth and from city residents’ families; also to all other ways of life pleasing to God, so as to ensure... education and teaching sciences to Christian children... so that the cloistered community and the school, one and all abide by the law of the Eastern Orthodox Church.” The members of the Kyiv brotherhood were thus under the obligation to keep a school on the parcel of land donated by Hulevychivna, a patron of the arts who had her name inscribed in the academy annals with those of Petro Mohyla and Ivan Mazepa.
The brotherhood’s school was the academy’s predecessor. In October 1632, 370 years ago, the celebrated Metropolitan Petro Mohyla of Kyiv and Galicia [Halychyna] founded the Collegium of the Kyiv Brotherhood, incorporating the schools of the brotherhood and the Lavra Monastery of the Caves.
Humanitarian culture flourished under Petro Mohyla, an outstanding reformer of the Eastern Orthodox Church, enlightener, and ecumenist, as it should in today’s Ukrainian society. Owing to this higher school (in 1658, the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium received the legal status of a higher educational establishment and the title of academy), the Ukrainian nation had an inexhaustible intellectual source, even through its hardest of ordeals, in the years of the national-liberation struggle, overall ruination, radical social and Weltanschauung changes in the early 18th century. The academy formed schools, fruitful in the realms of philosophy, poetry, music, architecture, and art. It was also here that the first professional drama company in Ukraine appeared. Students from Moravia, Poland, Slovakia, Serbia, Wallachia, Transylvania, Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Bosnia, and Croatia were honored to receive higher education at the academy in Kyiv. It may be said without exaggeration that the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy had become Europe’s best institution of higher learning in the late 17th century — and not only in the Slavic world! Among its renowned graduates were philosopher Hryhory Skovoroda, architect Ivan Hryhorovych-Barsky, composers Maksym Berezovsky and Artemy Vedel, historian, poet, and Archbishop Lazar Baranovych, encyclopedist and enlightener Mikhail Lomonosov, Cossack chronicler Samiylo Velychko, historians Mykola Bantysh-Kamensky and Maxym Berlynsky, celebrated church hierarchs, Stefan Yavorsky, Dmytro (Tuptalo), Ivan (Maksymovych), Bishop Josaphat (Horlenko)... Incidentally, Stefan Yavorsky, a noted philosopher and poet, present at the cradle of the Moscow Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy founded in 1701.
Among the academy patrons and benefactors were historical figures such as Hetman Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny who bequeathed all his money to the brotherhood schools of Kyiv, Lutsk, and Lviv (“...for the benefit of instruction and perpetuation of the bachelors of art,” read the deed), Metropolitan Petro Mohyla, Ukrainian Hetmans Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Ivan Vyhovsky, Ivan Mazepa... Under the latter’s rule, the Kyiv- Mohyla Academy reached it peak. It enjoyed respect and was cared for by all Ukrainian social strata: clergy, Cossacks, petty bourgeoisie, and peasants.
The academy existed till 1817 when ordered closed by the Holy Synod in St. Petersburg. Tsar Alexander regarded it (with reason) as a threat to the interests of the Russian Empire. A year later, a theological academy opened on the premises, closed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
Finally, on August 24, 1992, 175 years later, the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy was formally reinstated and the first students were initiated that same day. On May 19, 1994, the president of Ukraine signed an edict whereby the academy was now the “Kyiv- Mohyla Academy” National University of Ukraine.
