Povstenko, Oleksa

Povstenko, Oleksa [Повстенко, Олекса], b 25 February 1902 in Khashchova, Haisyn county, Podilia gubernia, d 15 January 1973 in Washington, DC. Architect and art scholar; member of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the USA. A graduate of the Volhynian Industrial Polytechnic (1927), he completed his studies at the Kharkiv Institute of Industrial Construction, taught at the Kharkiv Construction Tekhnikum and the Kharkiv Civil-Engineering Institute, and worked as an architectural engineer and, from 1935, an architect for the People's Commissariat of Education in Kyiv. During the German occupation (1941–3) he directed the Saint Sophia Museum in Kyiv. A postwar émigré, he settled in the United States of America in 1950 and worked in the architecture department of the Capitol in Washington, DC. He designed a number of residential and public buildings, including the Kharkiv Pedagogical Institute, the Kharkiv Astronomical Observatory, and the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Winnipeg (1949, co-designer). He compiled a dictionary of Ukrainian architectural terminology (1939–41) and wrote books on the historical maps of Kyiv (1946, with Petro Kurinny), the history of Ukrainian art (1948), Kyiv’s history and architecture (1954), and the Saint Sophia Cathedral (The Cathedral of St. Sophia in Kiev, 1954).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]