Turning the pages back... May 13, 1865 (05/12/96)

Turning the pages back...

May 13, 1865

The Richelieu Lyceum was a private school for children of Odessa's aristocracy and wealthy merchant class, named after the French governor of the city of the early 19th century. In the 1850s, under the influence of district education superintendent, Dr. Nikolai Pirogov, it gradually gained the status of an institution of higher learning.

Tsarist officials initially opposed the founding of a university in Odessa, since they considered the city a hotbed of unrest, and proposed Mykolayiv as an alternate site. However, pressure from the local nobility and wealthier merchants prompted Alexander II to grant the lyceum university status in June 1862.

Ukraine's third university was officially opened as the New Russia University on May 13, 1865, with three faculties - history and philology, physics and mathematics, and law - and an initial enrollment of 175 students. A faculty of medicine was added in 1900.

Most of its students came from southern Ukraine, the Don region or the Caucasus, although the school also attracted students from the Slavic Balkan countries. All instruction was in Russian, although in 1906 there was an attempt to initiate a Ukrainian history course to be offered in Ukrainian by Oleksander Hrushevsky, the more famous historian's brother.

During the 1917 Ukrainian revolution, attempts were made to Ukrainianize the university. Upon the Bolshevik seizure of power, the New Russian University was dissolved and broken up into research institutes.

In 1933, these were merged again to form what is now known as Odessa University, and in 1945 it was named in honor of the Nobel Prize-winning immunologist Illia Menchikov.

Source: "Odessa University," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

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