Askold's Grave

The Primary Chronicle, under the year 882, says Oleh lured Askold out of Kyiv and had him killed, that the body was carried up and buried on the hill ‘now called Uhorske’, and that a boyar named Olma later raised a church of St Nicholas over the mound. There is still a church of St Nicholas on that slope, a white rotunda of 1810, and the wooded ground falling to the Dnipro is still called Askold's Grave.

No excavation here has ever produced a ninth-century prince. The documented history is younger and harder: for two centuries this was one of Kyiv's grandest cemeteries, and the Soviet authorities took it apart in the 1930s.

The prince in the chronicle

Askold ruled in Kyiv until 882, when Oleh came from the north, drew him to the riverbank on a pretext and killed him along with Dir. The chronicle separates the two men even in burial: Askold on the hill above the Dnipro, Dir behind St Iryna's. The name fixed itself to the tract only in the eighteenth century, when Kyiv's antiquarians matched the legend to the ground.

The dedication has a second explanation: Byzantine sources suggest Askold was baptised around 867 and took the name Nicholas, which would make the saint on the hill the prince under another name. Tradition holds it; the evidence does not settle it.

Melensky's rotunda

Andriy Melensky, the city architect who shaped early nineteenth-century Kyiv, designed the church in 1809; it was consecrated on 1 September 1810. A Voronezh merchant, Samuil Meshcheriakov, paid the 8,000 roubles in memory of his wife. He replaced a wooden predecessor with a compact brick rotunda under a dome, set near enough to the slope's edge to be read from the river.

It did not stay a church. In 1936 it became a restaurant; in 1938 the architect Petro Yurchenko took off the dome and ringed the drum with an Ionic colonnade, leaving a park pavilion. It passed to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in 1992, was restored to Melensky's design by Volodymyr Khromchenkov in 1997 and reconsecrated the following year. A bell tower with fifty-one Dutch-cast bells followed two decades later.

The kingdom of white marble

Kyivans called the necropolis on these slopes the kingdom of white marble. Burials began around the old church in the eighteenth century, and it grew into a public cemetery that rivalled Baikove: some two thousand graves, family crypts behind wrought iron, marble crosses under planted borders. Those buried here included the sugar magnate and patron Vasyl Symyrenko, the actors Mykola Solovtsov and Maria Hlebova, and Petro Nesterov, the pilot who flew the first loop.

The cemetery was closed in 1919 and dismantled between 1934 and 1936 to make a park. Crypts and headstones were broken up, and funerary sculpture was handed to art students as study models. A few graves were moved rather than lost — Nesterov to Lukianivske, the actors to Baikove — but most of the two thousand went unmarked into the lawn.

Kruty, and the markers that came back

On 19 March 1918 the Central Rada buried the students and cadets killed at Kruty here, after a procession through the city centre; Pavlo Tychyna wrote In Memory of the Thirty that spring. The figure usually given is twenty-eight, though the historian Yaroslav Tynchenko, in research published in 2016, could confirm only two by name — Volodymyr Naumovych and Volodymyr Shulhyn. Where the others lie is not known.

A memorial cross for Kruty went up in 1992, and since 2014 the park has gathered markers to the dead of the Revolution of Dignity and the Russo-Ukrainian war. Fourteen bronze reliefs by the sculptor Hennadiy Yershov, mounted on wooden crosses, make a Way of the Cross climbing from the river.

How to visit

Walk right around the rotunda first: Melensky set it on the edge of the slope, and it only resolves from the downhill side. Past it the ground opens onto the Dnipro, the bridges and the flat left bank; the benches on the upper terraces are why half the people here have come. Late afternoon is the better light.

The park lies in Pechersk between Dniprovskyi uzviz, vul. Ivana Mazepy and Mariinskyi Park, fifteen to twenty minutes downhill from Arsenalna metro. The paths are steep and several do not register as streets on a map, so allow more time than the distance suggests. The church is a working parish; if a service is on, keep back and keep quiet. And remember what is under the grass. This is a cemetery before it is a viewpoint.