Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv

Tsar Nicholas I founded what is now Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 1834, with the explicit intention of Russifying Right-Bank Ukraine following the Polish Insurrection. He probably did not anticipate that the building’s most enduring legacy would be an argument about paint. The crimson walls and black column capitals officially correspond to the ribbon of the Imperial Order of St. Vladimir, whose motto the university also adopted, which is a tidy explanation that locals have been ignoring ever since.

The competing theories are more satisfying. The walls were painted with students’ blood. The red marks shame for poor academic performance. A worker mixed the colors incorrectly and no one caught it in time. Tour guides have long favored a version in which Nicholas II ordered the red paint during the First World War to remind students of battlefield sacrifice, a story that would be more compelling if the building had not already been painted crimson in 1842, seventy-two years before the war began.

The university was named for Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet, who died before the honor was conferred and never studied there. His park sits directly across from the red walls, which means the building now faces a monument to the man it is named after, who never set foot inside it. The university was founded to suppress Ukrainian identity. It was later named for the poet who most embodied it. Nicholas I did not get what he paid for.