Stepan Kovnir

Stepan Demianovych Kovnir ( ; ; 1695–1786) was a Ukrainian builder and master mason in Kyiv. His nearly sixty years of labor brought aesthetic unity to the ancient, sprawling center of Ukrainian culture and education, the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Birth and background

Stepan Kovnir was born in 1695 in Hvozdiv, a village on Ros River south of Kyiv, owned by , a wealthy monastery in the Kyiv sotnia of the Kyiv Regiment in the Cossack Hetmanate established by Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Today the village is in the Feodosiivska rural hromada of the Obukhiv Raion in Kyiv Oblast. Although peasants the family were not serfs, so he was not bound to the hermitage, and after his parents died he was able to travel to Kyiv in 1718. For some unknown reason Kovnir entered into serfdom under that very wealthy Lavra and served it for nearly the next six decades. Monastic duties were not required of him however. Instead he joined brick masons H. Teslenko and Iosyf Rubashevsky and engineers S. Chelakayev and N. Vladimirov in the rebuilding efforts. He learned the trade under his first teacher, Moscow architect Ivan Kalandin, beginning with humble projects: warehouses, storerooms, a bakery and a locksmith's shop. Over the succeeding decades he would work and rework these buildings following repeated fires from 1727 to 1773, incorporating folk motifs into the structure and stucco facings.

Eventually the largest one came to be called in honor of his efforts there to develop the Ukrainian baroque architectural style that celebrates the region's ancient, distinct culture. That building, built immediately northeast of the monastery's cathedral, began as a bakery and Kovnir festooned its gables with lush swags of botanical motifs. Later, a print shop was added to the north side of the bakery. Kovnir relied more on classic columns and far less on plant elements in the gables of this extension. But he gave the assemblage a unified facade that makes it appear as a single building with six gables. In 1729 he collaborated with Yuriy Belinsky to create the volutes, pediments and gold disks for the roof of the Lavra's Assumption Cathedral;

Kovnir deepened his skills from 1741 to 1745 when Gottfried Johann Schädel consulted with him to replace the Lavra's old, wooden bell tower with the , built of brick, stucco and ceramic in a classical style. The top three tiers of the 4-story structure have Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns, successively. The capitals of the columns are cast ceramic and no two of the Corinthian capitals, with their lush acanthus leaves, are alike.

Kovnir's career moved from strength to strength as his name became widely known. The Kozelets cathedral was built in the Chernihiv region during the same period this Vasylkiv sobor was built in the Kyiv region and Hryhorovych-Barskyi was the cathedral's architect. However, the Vasylkiv church forgoes the cathedral's mock Roman pediments above each window in favor of curving volute ornaments. Its ground floor windows are larger and the church's overall proportions are more harmonious. It bears a memorial plaque expressing the gratitude of the community for the building of the church.

In 1755 Kovnir finished Klov Palace, a hostelry intended for noble and royal guests of Pechersk Lavra and which had been begun by Neelov. For this he was released from serfdom, became a master mason, was made a burgher and given a manor south of Pechersk, in what is now the Holosiivskyi district. This allowed him to enter into a contract on his own behalf with Manasiy Maksymovich, the rector of Podil's Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and archimandrite of its neighboring Kyiv Bratsky Monastery, to erect the bell tower of that monastery in 1756. The tower was square, three stories high and topped with a baroque dome and cross. Its style, visible in architectural plans still in existence, indicates the architect could have been Hryhorovych-Barsky. Built mostly after his release from serfdom, this has been called his masterpiece for the delicate and innovative plaster motifs Kovnir used above the archivolt of the first tier and above the arches of the second. They combine the roses and trefoils of baroque aesthetic with the delicacy of rococo, all while expressing this using motifs from traditional Ukrainian embroidery. Kovnir finished the final major architectural element at the Pechersk Lavra when he erected the bell tower for the Church of the Annunciation at the Near Caves in 1759 to 1763, thus bringing aesthetic unity to the monastic complex. In 1767 he completed building for the hermitage in Kytayiv, ornamented with Ukrainian baroque motifs in stucco. After Charles de Chardone added a second story to the book bindery Kovnir had built in 1757, changing its architectural style from Ukrainian baroque to renaissance, Kovnir built a second one from 1772 to 1773. Vasyl married Tatyana Efremivna, with whom he had a daughter named Iryna Vasylivna Kryshtalevska. Information about his life was rediscovered by B. A. Krytsky and published in his 1954 Ph.D. thesis, Народные мастера архитектуры XVIII века на Украине: Степан Ковнир: Архитектурно-строительная деятельность (People's masters of architecture in 18th century Ukraine: Stepan Kovnir: Architectural and construction activity).

In Vasylkiv, the exterior wall of the Church of Saint Anthony and St.Theodosius bears a gold-painted plaque that reads,

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