The House of Organ and Chamber Music is the most outstanding architectural building of the early 20th century in Dnipro and one of the city’s most striking sights. The house was erected between 1913 and 1915 and initially had nothing to do with organ music. It was the Briansk (St. Nicholas) church, designed in the Neoclassical style with baroque elements by Heorgii Turovets, a church architect of Poltava province. The cross-shaped church had five domes and a three-tiered bell tower with a clock.
The temple was decorated with original stucco inside and outside. The interior design and the gilded iconostasis in particular, created in the Rastrelli style, were developed by the St. Petersburg artist and architect Yevstafii Kostiantynovych. Ilya Repin’s student, Mykhailo Ivanov, made paintings for the church. The building had a steam heating system and electric lighting.

The church was built in just 28 weeks despite the beginning of the First World War in the fall of 1914. However, when the Bolsheviks took power in Ukraine, they closed St. Nicholas Church as well as many other religious institutions. The temple served as a house for pioneers, a sports school, and even a coal warehouse for a long time. Only at the end of the 1970s, upon the request of the local community, was St. Nicholas Church added to the register of architectural monuments protected by the state. And in the early 1980s, a decision was made to restore its original architectural appearance and turn the former church into an organ hall. This is how the new life of the building began as a cultural hub and the centre of European-level organ and classical music in Dnipro.
The building was restored in 1986. The first murals were not preserved, so Ukrainian artists Viacheslav Danylov and Serhii Isaiev painted new ones. The organ, created by the German company ‘Sauer’, was being installed a year after the restoration. A 12-ton two-manual mechanical organ with 30 registers and 2,074 pipes of various diameters and lengths was delivered to Dnipro from Frankfurt an der Oder.
Since the first concert in 1987, the House of Organ and Chamber Music has hosted many international festivals, competitions, and tours of performers from Europe and all over the world. About 300 concerts were conducted here annually, and more than 30,000 listeners came to hear the immortal works of Bach, Bortniansky, Mozart, Handel, Tchaikovsky, and other geniuses every month. 70 musicians, 4 orchestras, 4 quartets, and 2 music lecture halls have created art and functioned for 35 years so that people could indulge in beauty and inspiration. Moreover, the famous organ was included in the list of UNESCO cultural heritage.
However, on March 11, 2022, the famous instrument fell silent. As a result of shelling by the Russian forces during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the walls and windows of the House of Organ and Chamber Music were mutilated by missile fragments.
The site that once held memories may now turn into a memory itself.