Legends of Kharkiv and Mordinson - Learn More About the Capital of Single Sexy Women From Ukraine

Kharkov is considered to be a "young" city in Ukraine, it’s "only" 355 years old, it’s not much if you compare it with cities like Kerch, which is almost 2000 years old and was found by the Greeks on the shores of the Black Sea.

There are many fantastic legends about Kharkiv, some of them seem to be quite real, others sound more like a fairy tale.

Few legends of old Kharkiv are in this item (they are in no particular order):

During the late 1970s, at the Guravlevka area, not too far away from the leather processing plant, there was a dump which was used by the Kommunar factory which produced the TV sets (also nearby). Kids were often there to collect parts of electronic equipment and some of them were worthy a look; you could sometimes find a TV which was almost functional and only needed some minor repairs.

Later in the 1980s, they started to level down the dump in order to leave the black market, without the constant stream of spare parts for the TVs (there was no such a think as private repair shop for the home appliances at that time); but in the 1970s it lay there untouched! So the story itself happened around 1975, one local fellow needed some wire to arrange the fence around his little garden where he planted some potatoes. He thought it would be a good idea to find some wire at this dump, and that’s what he did! He searched for a while and finally found a big coil of wire, it was at least 40 pounds, and the wire was good - not too thick and not too thin and it looked like it would make a perfect fence for the potato garden.

So he brought it home, made the fence and used all of the wire - what a great fence it made! He was very happy then! In about one week, he had few guests in the black suits, they took him to the city’s KGB office to perform the interrogation. It turned out that the coil of platinum wire was thrown away by a mistake from the Kommunar TV factory. When it became apparent that the poor guy had no intention to steal the precious wire and simply didn’t have a clue - they let him go of course, but he never planted potatoes since then and never went to the dump too.

Another legend has to do with the Uspenskiy Cathedral of Kharkov. During the Russian Empire, there was a regulation which prohibited to build any cathedral or churches that would be higher that the Issakivskiy Cathedral in the capital of Russian Empire. But when the Uspenskiy Cathedral of Kharkov was being built, some of the wealthy kharkovites bribed the architect and he placed a huge cross which heads the church approximately 4 feet higher than it was supposed to, and therefore the Uspenskiy Cathedral is actually taller than the main cathedral of the Russian Empire! Nobody volunteered to double check the height of course!

When you are in Kharkov, you can’t miss the monument to a famous Ukraine writer and poet Taras Shevchenko. The monument is a very interesting one and stands in the beginning of the park named by the writer. In front of the monument you can see a very nicely decorated house with statues of 4 women, the legend is that one of the women is the architect’s wife and if you look carefully you’ll see that those 4 statues are very different from each other and we still don’t know which one portrays Beketov’s wife.

Fact: In the Pushkinskaya Street, there is a one-story building in which Stalin stayed, during the civilian war in Ukraine. It’s a gray building with inscription above the front door: "SALVE".

Maybe a legend: During the Nazi occupation of Kharkov Germans found a really beautiful horse at the city’s race track and decided to ship it back to Germany. When it reached Poland, the horse managed to escape and came back to Kharkov! The occupiers were determined to get it to Germany, they blinded the horse and sent it back to German once again, and it actually ran away for the second time and somehow managed to get back to the city blind!!! It lived all its life in Kharkov’s hippodrome.

Fact: Many of the houses for the workers of Kharkov Tractor Factory were built by the American construction workers. And you can still find inscriptions in English, in some of those houses. People call the flats in those houses: "Amerikanka"!

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