Mykhailo Dehteriov

Mykhailo Dehteriov was born into a Kyiv merchant family and lost his father early. Building up the family trading firm, by the late 1860s he was among the city’s richest men; from 1871 he sat on the city council and later became deputy chairman of the Kyiv stock exchange committee. Contemporaries remembered him as extremely thrifty, even miserly: he and his wife had no children and lived quietly and modestly.

Yet he became one of Kyiv’s most generous benefactors. In 1883 he bought an estate at 5 Pokrovska Street on Podil and opened an almshouse for 40 people there; in 1892 he opened the “House for Widows” at 1 Pokrovska Street (architect Volodymyr Nikolaev), with 45 flats for poor widows and their children. He paid for St Michael’s Church at the Oleksandrivska Hospital (now 39/1 Shovkovychna Street), consecrated in 1895, where he lies buried in the crypt.

In his will he left the city property worth 2.5 million rubles plus about 2 million in securities and cash. With this money a complex of 13 buildings designed by Nikolaev went up in 1900–1902 on the Old Zhytomyr Road in Lukianivka: an almshouse for 500, two children’s shelters, a hospital and a church. In 1908 the road was renamed in his honour — today’s Dehtiarivska Street — and the almshouse buildings at 19 Dehtiarivska now house a military institute.