NowKyiv

Architecture

Architecture in Kyiv

Kyiv carries a thousand years of church-building above the Dnipro, its gold domes the fixed points on the skyline. Waves of destruction and rebuilding mean many of the oldest-looking churches are careful reconstructions of what stood before.

• House with Chimaeras

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  Completed 1902

  Vladislav Gorodetsky

  An apartment house across from the presidential offices, encrusted with concrete animals. Vladislav Gorodetsky built it as his own speculative block on a steep site, using the new material of reinforced concrete for both the deep basement levels and the menagerie of hunting scenes and sea creatures on the walls. The beasts advertised what concrete could be moulded into. It is an Art Nouveau oddity that doubled as a demonstration of its architect's engineering.

• St Andrew’s Church

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  Completed 1754

  Bartolomeo Rastrelli

  A Baroque church set at the top of a steep cobbled descent toward the old merchant quarter. Bartolomeo Rastrelli drew it as a single green-and-gold church raised on a tall structural base that doubles as a terrace over the hillside. Its five domes are arranged for the silhouette rather than for interior space, which is small. The imperial Baroque of Saint Petersburg is set down here on a Kyiv hilltop.

• St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery

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  Founded 1113

  Sviatopolk II

  A monastery on the hill facing Saint Sophia, its cathedral crowned with gold domes. Founded by Sviatopolk II and finished around 1113, it was demolished by the Soviets in 1935 and rebuilt in bright blue and gold by 1999. The reconstruction restored a Baroque skin the church had gained centuries after its medieval start. It stands as a deliberate undoing of a Soviet erasure, rebuilt as soon as the state that razed it was gone.

• Kyiv Pechersk Lavra

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  Founded 1073

  Kyivan Rus

  A monastery of caves and churches on the bluffs south of the centre, founded in the eleventh century. Its Dormition Cathedral was begun in 1073 by Byzantine builders, blown up in 1941 and rebuilt by 2000, so the golden church on the hill today is a modern reconstruction. Below it, monks are still buried in a network of cave passages cut into the slope. It remains the spiritual centre of Orthodoxy in Ukraine.

• Saint Sophia Cathedral

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  Founded 1037

  Yaroslav the Wise

  The cathedral at the heart of the old upper town, founded by Yaroslav the Wise. It was built by Byzantine masons with thirteen domes over a cross plan, its interior lined with mosaics and frescoes that still survive from the eleventh century. Later centuries wrapped the exterior in a Ukrainian Baroque of white and green, so the shell and the core are of different ages. It is the oldest standing church in the city and the model the rest answer to.