Closed in 1817, Revived in 1991: The Kyiv-Mohyla Academy

On October 15, 1615, Halshka Hulevychivna, a noblewoman of Kyiv, registered a deed in the city’s records donating her estate and land to a monastery and to a school for “the children of the Orthodox people.” The National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (NaUKMA) treats this day as its founding date, and the university’s charter (Article 1.3) likewise states that the Academy has its origins in the brotherhood school created on October 15, 1615.

From this school grew the largest center of learning in 17th- and 18th-century Ukraine. This article traces its history, through encyclopedias and legal decrees, from its closure under the Russian Empire to its revival in 1991, the year Ukraine declared independence. The building on the reverse of the 500-hryvnia banknote is also this Academy (National Bank of Ukraine).

1615: The Brotherhood School of Podil

According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, or CIUS, at the University of Alberta; hereafter IEU), the Kyiv Epiphany Brotherhood was an organization formed around 1615 in Podil, the lower part of Kyiv, by wealthy townspeople, nobles, clergy, and Cossacks to defend Orthodoxy against Polish rule and the spread of Catholicism. In 1620, Hetman Petro Sahaidachny joined it “together with the entire Zaporozhian Cossack Host.” That same year, the brotherhood also obtained permission to run a school from the visiting Patriarch of Jerusalem.

The founding year of the brotherhood school is given as “1615–16” in IEU’s entry on the Academy, and as “1615” in its entry on the brotherhood. The university treats the date of Hulevychivna’s donation as its founding date.

1632: Petro Mohyla Combines It into a Collegium

According to IEU, Petro Mohyla was born in Moldavia on January 10, 1597 (the university’s website gives 1596), and died in Kyiv on January 11, 1647. Born into a family of Moldavian and Wallachian princes, he fled to relatives in western Ukraine after his father’s death and studied at, among other places, the brotherhood school in Lviv. He was elected archimandrite of the Kyiv Cave Monastery in 1627, and was consecrated Metropolitan of Kyiv on May 7, 1633.

In 1631, Mohyla opened a school at the Cave Monastery, and the following year, 1632, combined it with the brotherhood school to form a collegium (the university’s website gives September 1632; only IEU’s entry on the brotherhood gives the merger as 1631). According to IEU, Mohyla envisioned this school as an “academy” that would teach philosophy and theology and bring together a network of secondary schools, intending it to compete on equal terms with the Jesuit colleges of Poland. But Poland’s King Władysław IV, fearing the competition, granted it only the standing of a college and forbade it to teach philosophy or theology. It gained full rights as an academy in 1694, and was formally recognized as an academy by Peter I in 1701. The university’s website separately states that the Treaty of Hadiach in 1658 granted it legal rights as a university.

Its teaching followed the model of the Jesuit schools, its formidable rivals. According to IEU, while other Orthodox schools emphasized Church Slavonic and Greek, this collegium gave first place to Latin and Polish, while also teaching Church Slavonic and Ruthenian, the written language, close to the spoken tongue, of Ukrainians and Belarusians at the time. Students progressed through grammar classes and on to poetics, rhetoric, three years of philosophy, and four years of theology. About 120 manuscript textbooks of poetics and rhetoric and about 80 of philosophy, written in Latin by the teaching staff, survive.

The School That Trained Hetmans

IEU writes that, from the start, the Academy was supported by the upper ranks of the Cossacks, the starshyna, and trained the next generation of their leaders. It states that later hetmans — Ivan Vyhovsky, Ivan Samoilovych, Pavlo Teteria, Ivan Mazepa, and Pavlo Polubotok — all studied here. The years 1687–1709, under Mazepa’s rule, were a “golden age,” when enrollment exceeded 2,000 students.

Its teachers included Lazar Baranovych, Dmytro Tuptalo, Stefan Yavorsky, and Theophan Prokopovych. According to IEU, several of them went on to play major roles in Peter I’s educational reforms in Russia, and the Moscow Academy was modeled on the Kyiv Academy. In the 18th century, the philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda also studied here (see the article on Skovoroda).

After 1709, Under the Russian Empire

IEU writes that the Academy’s golden age came to an abrupt end when Mazepa was defeated at the Battle of Poltava in 1709. Its property was plundered by Russian forces, students from Right-Bank Ukraine, then under Polish rule, could no longer be admitted, and enrollment fell to 161 by 1711. Peter I’s ban on publications in Ruthenian was also a major blow.

Enrollment later recovered, from 490 in 1738–39 to 1,110 in 1744–45, but once Catherine II abolished the Hetmanate in 1764 and nationalized monastic property in 1786, the Academy lost its main source of funding. By the end of the 18th century it had come to resemble a diocesan seminary, and by 1811, 1,069 of its 1,198 students were candidates for the priesthood. According to the university’s website, the Academy was closed by an order of the Holy Synod (the highest body of the Russian Orthodox Church) on August 14, 1817, and, according to IEU, the Kyiv Theological Academy opened on the same site two years later. The course of events leading up to the abolition of the Hetmanate is summarized in the article on the end of Cossack self-rule.

1991: Revival in the Year of Independence

On September 19, 1991, Leonid Kravchuk, Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, signed the Decision “On the Revival of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” (No. 1570-XII). Citing the need for people able to run the country and represent Ukraine in the international community, the Decision reopened the Academy “on its historic site in Kyiv, as an independent institution of higher education” and named it “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy University.” According to IEU, the university formally opened in August 1992, with the literary scholar Viacheslav Briukhovetskyi as its first president.

On May 19, 1994, under a decree of President Kravchuk (No. 238/94), the university was given the status of a national university with self-governance and took the name “National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.” According to IEU, this university was the first in Ukraine to launch, in 1992, a four-year bachelor’s program allowing students to choose courses across disciplines. It has about 4,000 students (as of 2020), its campus is in Podil, and its oldest building is the former Academy building (the Mazepa Building), built in 1704.

The Words “First” and “Oldest”

This Academy is often introduced with the words “first” or “oldest.” But the subject making the claim, and what exactly is being claimed, differ each time.

• The 1991 decision of the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada: describes the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy as “the first institution of higher education in Eastern Europe”
• The Great Ukrainian Encyclopedia (VUE): defines it as “the first institution of the university type in the country”
• IEU’s entry on Mohyla: writes that the collegium “would in time become the largest center of learning and education in Eastern Europe”

IEU also writes, however, that a post-secondary institution called the “Ostroh Academy” opened around 1576 in Ostroh, in Volyn, and continued until 1636. Which answer is “first” depends on what one counts as a school of higher education. What is certain is that this school, as the largest center of learning in 17th- and 18th-century Ukraine, trained the leaders of the Cossack state and the clergy.