Horyany Rotunda

Ukraine has one interior painted by masters working in Giotto's wake, and it is not in Kyiv or Lviv but in a squat brick church on the last hill the Carpathians drop into the Uzhhorod plain. The Horyany Rotunda gives nothing away from the road: low, half-settled into the ground, around eight metres across and about as tall.

It came to light by accident. In 1879, during repairs to the then half-forgotten church of St Anne, a workman watched colour surface from under the old plaster. Budapest specialists dated the paintings to the 14th and 15th centuries; the building carrying them was older still, and how much older has been argued about ever since.

Nobody has settled how old it is

Between the 10th century and the 14th, most of the options have been published by someone. Hungarian researchers, after the 1911 restoration, matched the brickwork to Romanesque castle walls nearby and settled on the 10th or 11th. Volodymyr Sichynsky read a Byzantine hand and argued for the 12th–13th. Hryhorii Lohvyn, finding 13th-century painting under the Italian work, proposed Galician masters in the age of Prince Danylo. Florian Zapletal's 1922 article, the first to bring the rotunda wider notice, credited the Podillia prince Fedir Koriatovych in the 14th.

The sharpest recent case belongs to the Transcarpathian historian Yosyp Kobal, who drops the Byzantine reading altogether: round churches came from the west, not from Rus'. He puts it in the 12th or early 13th century and gives it to the Knights Hospitaller, who raised round brick chapels across Hungary on Jerusalem models — a memorial chapel, on his reading, long before any parish used it. Horyany has always had a shorter answer: one night, on the orders of King Stephen I.

Six petals in plan

What stands today is two buildings joined. The cylinder at the east end, now the sanctuary, is the old part: its walls are thick enough to take six semicircular niches cut into them from the inside, so the plan reads as a six-petalled flower. Nothing comparable survives elsewhere in Ukraine; the nearest relatives are early hexaconch churches on the Dalmatian coast. From outside you would never guess: the six facets are flattened almost to a circle, with a windowed drum and a low dome above.

The rectangular nave under its steep gabled roof came in the 14th century, the stone sacristy after it, the bell tower in the Baroque period — provincial Gothic of the kind Transcarpathian builders made their own, hence the pointed arch of the portal. Four centuries of masonry, set end to end.

The frescoes

The painting came in three campaigns. The oldest is Romanesque, high in the drum and dome — apostles, a St George — worn now to faint silhouettes.

The cycle people come for is the second, from the middle and later 14th century, in the eastern apses: the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Magi, the Flight into Egypt, the Last Supper, the road to Golgotha, the Crucifixion. They run in tiers around the curved wall, laid onto wet plaster in true fresco. Art historians describe them as the only monumental painting in Ukraine from the generation after Giotto. The commission is usually laid at the door of the Drugeths, the Italian family granted the Uzhhorod domain by the Angevin king Charles Robert; one of them returned from Naples in 1354, perhaps with painters. A third campaign, Gothic and 15th-century, covers the nave, where a Crucifixion reads most clearly.

Give your eyes a few minutes when you go in. The windows are slits and the light is thin; the scenes surface slowly out of the half-dark.

Lightning, and thirty years shut

On a Sunday in May 1959 a storm broke over Horyany during the liturgy. Lightning struck the bell tower and killed six people who were standing in the doorway, the church being too small to hold everyone who had come; one was a woman of 21 who had brought her three-month-old daughter. The authorities declared the building unsafe and shut it, and shut it stayed for some thirty years, kept from 1966 as a branch of the regional museum.

It had already passed between confessions more than once — Roman Catholic, Reformed under the Drugeths, Catholic again, Orthodox under Soviet rule. In 1991 it went to the Mukachevo Greek Catholic Eparchy, was repaired and returned to use, officially as the Church of the Protection of the Mother of God, and is listed as a monument of national significance.

Visiting

Horyany sits on the eastern edge of the city, on provulok Muzeinyi; minibuses run to the terminus and the church is a few hundred metres from there. It is a working parish, so the interior is not open on demand — ask locally about times rather than turning up on spec.

Look at rotunda.digital before you go. The brothers Ivan and Leonid Ilko spent four months photographing the church on a Ukrainian Cultural Foundation grant and put the results online free: a 3D tour into the dome, and the frescoes at a resolution no visitor gets in that light. You will know what you are looking for once you are standing under it.