Continuing on from the Golden Gate of Kiev, we saw the exterior of St. Sophia Cathedral with the accompanying Sofiyska Square in front of it. St. Sophia Cathedral was built in the early 11th Century and took twenty years to complete. Over the course of time it’s had its share of ups and downs, such as the four hundred years between the capture of the city by the Mongols in 1240 until 1633 when it was reconstructed and expanded. After the Russian Revolution, the Soviets planned on razing the cathedral and turning the grounds into a park, but ultimately the cathedral was left standing (albeit transformed into an architectural museum). It is not currently serving as a church, but it contains a museum focusing on Christianity in the Ukraine.
The statue in front of the church is of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, a Cossack from the mid 1600s who led an uprising against Poland-Lithuania (which controlled a lot of western Ukraine and Kiev at the time). He is considered a national hero of the Ukraine for overthrowing the foreign, Catholic occupiers and creating a Cossack state (the Cossack Hetmanate). It only lasted four years due to mounting Polish pressure, so eventually Khmelnytsky decided to become a part of Russia in 1654.
Mykhailivska Square with a statue of Princess Olga in the foreground and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the background. St. Michael’s Monastery is located to the right of the Ministry.
Mykhailivska Square is located a short ways down the road from Sofiyaskaya Square. The square is named after St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, which was built in the late 11th Century. Like St. Sophia’s, the monastery was largely ruined between 1240 and 1500, but was restored and became a very popular monastery in the Ukraine. The Monastery was destroyed by the Soviets in the 1934, replaced by an administrative center for the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (on the grounds that the original building had been so extensively reconstructed from its original form that it wasn’t worthy of preservation). The Soviet plan was to build numerous administrative buildings on the former grounds of the monastery though the only one actually completed is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainians declared the destruction of the monastery as a crime and the site was rebuilt from 1997-99.
Princess Olga ruled Kiev as regent from about 945-963. After the Drevlians (a tribe of Slavs who lived west of Kiev) killed her husband, they attempted to get her to marry their prince as a way of taking over Kievan Rus. Oleg naturally wasn’t too pleased with what they had done to her husband, so when twenty of their best men came to convince her to marry their prince, she had them buried alive. Not being content with that, she told the prince that she accepted his proposal but needed him to send more distinguished men to convince her people. When they arrived, she invited them to the bathhouse to clean up and once they were inside she locked the doors and burned down the bathhouse. Finally, she invited a large number of Drevlians to her husband’s funeral and after they were drunk her soldiers slaughtered several thousand of them, after which the Drevlians surrendered and agreed to pay her tribute in exchange for their lives.
Besides maintaining the independence of Kievan Rus for her young son Svyatoslav to take power, she is also the first Kievan ruler to convert to Christianity and became a saint for her work in spreading the gospel throughout the kingdom.
The statue of Princess Olga with the St. Michael’s Belltower in the background.
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