Vasyl Nahirny was born on 11 January in Hirne. He graduated Zürich Institute of Technology in 1875. Then he stayed on in Zürich as a lecturer. During that period he became involved with Western European co-operative movements as well as Russian and Ukrainian émigré circles. In 1882 Nahirny moved in Lviv. In 1883 he wrote a program for the socioeconomic revival of Galicia's Ukrainians at the Second Public Assembly. In the same year the first large Ukrainian consumer co-operativeNarodna Torhovlia was established on the initiative of Vasyl Nahirny and Appolon Nychai. It was headquartered in Lviv and served as a wholesaler to private and community-owned stores in villages and small towns throughout Galicia. Moreover, the co-operative served as a training network for their workers, and as a retailer in the larger cities. Through this cooperative Nahirny hoped to familiarize Ukrainians with commerce and generally support the development of the Ukrainian society of Galicia. In 1885-1890 Nahirny was an editor of the Lviv newspaper Batkivshchyna published in 1879–1896. In 1892 he became a co-founder of Dnister Insurance Company alongside with Kost Levytsky, Stepan Fedak, Demian Savchak, and T. Berezhnytsky. It became the oldest and largest Ukrainian insurance company in Galicia. In 1898 the first Ukrainian organization in Galicia concerned with the development of Ruthenian art – Society for the Advancement of Ruthenian Art – was founded. Vasyl Nahirny headed its board of directors. Vasyl Nahirny also made a significant contribution to the development of a mass physical-education movement Sokol that propagated national unity, self-confidence, and dignity through physical education. Ukrainian Sokil society was founded in Lviv in 1894 and Vasyl Nahirny became its first president.
Art
Living in Galicia Vasyl Nahirny drew up plans for around 200 Ukrainian Greek Catholic churches. From 1906 he worked with his son Yevhen Nahirny. Though they also successfully worked on designing such secular buildings as private villas, public libraries and others, they became famous for their church designs which incorporated distinctly Ukrainian elements featuring domes, rotunda, bell towers, internal galleries and balconies and iconostasis. He tried to build on the building style of Kyiv, showing the unity of Galicia with the Constantinople Byzantine center and his work laid the foundations of the creation of the modern Galician school of sacred architecture at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
