ABSTRACT
In Podolia, the region in South-Western Ukraine, small urban settlements received a spacious market square and a solid architectural construction in the centre, which contemporaries often described as a town hall. As the majority of town-dwellers there were involved in agricultural activities, it is questionable whether these “town halls” can be regarded as actual representatives of the bourgeois milieu. Available visual sources often expose wooden or mudbrick houses, associated with a poor village rather than a town, so it is surprising to find a monumental structure built of stone in the middle of a market square on a scale that sometimes reminds the viewer of a fortress or a citadel. And if, despite its rural appearance, a settlement possessed a town hall (a distinctively urban element), the question arises why it was necessary to invest in it and what functions it fulfilled in a small private town.
