St Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery

The cathedral across Mykhailivska Square is not eight hundred years old. The medieval original was dynamited to rubble in 1936; what stands today — sky-blue walls under seven gilded domes, bright above the green slopes falling to the Dnipro — was rebuilt from old photographs and reopened in 1999.

St Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery is one of those Kyiv views you learn on your first day and don't forget. It sits on Volodymyrska Hill almost opposite St Sophia, the two of them the most ceremonial pairing in the old city, and it is dedicated to the Archangel Michael — patron of Kyiv, the winged figure on the city's coat of arms.

A working monastery in the old city

St Michael's is a working men's monastery on the edge of the Upper Town, where the streets begin their drop toward Podil. It is not one building but a walled compound: the seven-domed cathedral, a tall bell tower, the refectory Church of St John the Theologian, monks' cells and a museum. The Kyiv Orthodox Theological Academy teaches here, and since December 2018 the monastery has been the seat of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

For a visitor it is three things at once — shrine, open-air museum and viewpoint over the river.

From Sviatopolk to the Mongols

An 1108 chronicle records that Prince Sviatopolk Iziaslavych — a grandson of Yaroslav the Wise, Michael by his baptismal name — raised a stone church here, and was buried in it in 1113. It was the only church in Kyiv then crowned with a gilded dome, and the name stuck: Zolotoverkhy, 'golden-domed'. Through the 12th century it held the tombs of the city's princes.

Tradition brings the relics of St Barbara here from Constantinople, carried by a Byzantine princess. The Mongol invasion of 1240 stripped the gold from the domes and the monastery declined for generations; it revived from the late 15th century and grew rich in the 17th and 18th, when Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky had the main dome re-clad and gilded. By 1900 some hundred thousand pilgrims came each year, a crowd matched in Kyiv only by the Lavra.

Razed, and rebuilt from photographs

The Soviet authorities shut the monastery in the early 1920s and, in the 1930s, condemned the cathedral and bell tower to clear ground for a government quarter in the new Soviet-Ukrainian capital. Crews began prising the 12th-century mosaics and frescoes from the walls in 1934; the silver reliquary of St Barbara, the silver royal doors and the gilded copper of the domes all vanished. The archaeologist Mykola Makarenko alone refused to sign the demolition act; he was arrested, exiled and executed. In 1936 the cathedral was dynamited.

Scholars lifted some of the mosaics and frescoes beforehand — the fragments spent decades in museums, many of them in Russia, and eighteen came back only in 2001 and 2004. Reconstruction, urged by the writer Oles Honchar among others, began in 1997; with no original drawings, architects rebuilt from photographs and old surveys, and the cathedral was consecrated at the decade's end.

Sky-blue walls, gold domes, a carillon

The rebuilt cathedral copies the form it had reached by the 18th century — Ukrainian Baroque over an older Rus core, a cross-in-square plan under gilded domes. Sky-blue against gold is the signature of Kyiv's Baroque, the same note as the Lavra and St Sophia. Over the main gate the bell tower carries a carillon of twelve bells, computer-controlled and the only one of its kind in Ukraine; on the hour it plays a melody across the square rather than only striking. Beside it stands the refectory Church of St John the Theologian, a trim Baroque building of 1713.

Inside, a tall carved iconostasis faces recreated mosaics; for the real 12th-century work, the monastery's museum keeps the surviving fragments — part of the famous Eucharist mosaic among them — rescued before the demolition and among the finest Byzantine art left from Kyivan Rus.

The night the bells rang

Stories cling to the place — St Barbara's rings, tunnels supposedly linking it to other shrines on the hill, buried treasure. Historians treat most with caution.

One recent night is not a legend. In the early hours of 11 December 2013, as riot police moved on the Maidan, the monastery opened its doors to fleeing protesters and rang its bells in alarm from one in the morning until five. By tradition it was the first such warning since the Mongols in 1240; thousands of Kyivans converged on the centre, and the monastery passed into the story of the Revolution of Dignity.

Visiting

The monastery is on Mykhailivska Square, a short walk from St Sophia and Maidan Nezalezhnosti and easy to reach from any central metro stop — the domes show from far off. Entry to the grounds and the cathedral is free; the museum may charge. It is an active monastery: heads covered for women, hats off for men at the door, and no photography inside during services.

Come early, ahead of the crowds, or toward sunset, when the domes hold the light and the terrace behind the cathedral opens onto the Dnipro, Podil and the funicular down to the lower town. An hour covers the monastery itself; with St Sophia's Square and the start of the Andriyivsky Descent next door, give it half a day.