Prorizna Street in Kyiv: History of Its Names and Monuments

Prorizna Street appeared in the late 1840s and early 1850s (it is shown as a planned street on an 1848 map of Kyiv). Its oldest known name is Martynivska.

In the 1850s it was also called Zolotokreshchatytska and Prorizna, meaning "cut through," since it was cut through the earthen rampart of the Old Kyiv fortifications from the time of Yaroslav the Wise.

From 1863 to 1919 its official name was Vasylchykivska, after the Kyiv Governor-General I. I. Vasilchikov, though its present name remained in wide unofficial use. From 1919 to 1990 it was named Sverdlova Street, after Yakov Sverdlov. Its historic name was restored in 1990.

Midway along Prorizna, on Muzychnyi Lane, stood the Conservatory Concert Hall and a music school (both designed by the architect Yosyp Karakis). They were destroyed in the explosions that devastated central Kyiv in 1941.

Three monuments appeared in the small square over the space of a few years. The first was a monument to Mykhailo Panikovsky, a character from the novel "The Golden Calf." In 2001 a monument to the Turkmen poet and thinker Magtymguly Pyragy was unveiled, and in 2002 a monument to Les Kurbas followed. A memorial plaque to Kurbas also hangs on building No. 17, where the Molodyi Theater he founded once worked; since 1990 the revived Molodyi Theater has been based in the same building.