The last private owner of the house at 41/27 Volodymyrska Street in Kyiv before the Bolshevik occupation was a first-guild merchant of Kyiv named Chaim-Shulim Volkov who traded in bricks, fish, flour, groceries, and resin. And it was bricks that became Volkov’s biggest business at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1906, he leased brick factories from S.V. Shakhov and F.A. Snizhko. And in 1911, Chaim Volkov himself owned the factories in the village of Korchuvate, in Mezhyhirya, and in the very Kyiv.
In the 1870’s, a “building boom” began in Kyiv. Kyiv’s apartment buildings, like the rest of the city’s capital buildings, were constructed solely of locally produced yellow bricks. For this purpose, blue-green spondylus clay was used, which lies in a thick layer in the Kyiv cliffs above the Dnipro River and in the valleys of Kyiv rivers and streams.
In our case, it goes about the brick manufactories of “Snizhko’s Heirs”. This was a whole dynasty of magnates – Florentyn, Oleksandr, Andrii, and Ilya Adamovych Snizhko – who had several brick factories near the villages of Stari Petrivtsi and Novi Petrivtsi and used clay from the slopes of the Mezhyhirya cliffs.
In addition to the “white building brick,” Kyiv’s buildings were constructed with the use of the so-called “mezhyhirka,” a small-format refractory red brick used to build all heating and other stoves in the city and beyond. The production of mezhyhirka mainly occurred in the villages of Stari and Novi Petrivtsi in the Kyiv district. In 1911, 11 million pieces of mezhyhirka were produced there.
