Alexander Gymnasium

Now Mariupol College, and long before that – Mariupol Alexander Gymnasium is one of the official Mariupol monuments of architecture. The gymnasium itself originated in 1876, but in the first decades of its existence it was located in private buildings. Only in 1894 the city council announced a competition on the best design of the building of Alexander Gymnasium. The design of the Odessa architect N.Tolvinsky won in this competition. According to the design, the building was turned to the main street of the city, but in the end its teachers insisted on a different placement of the building, as lighting was unfavorable for the gymnasium students.At the end of the 19th century, pupils and teachers of the gymnasium conducted regular local history excursions around the city and adjacent territories in order to find and preserve historical, archaeological, and material sources for studying the region. It was these excursions that became the basis of the funds of the future Mariupol Museum of Local Lore, and the reports from these excursions formed the basis of the reference book of each Mariupol ethnographer – the collection “Mariupol and its environs”