Feofaniia Park

In December 1951 six thousand vacuum tubes were wired together in a two-storey building in this park — a former convent dormitory — to make MESM, the first stored-program computer in continental Europe. Sergei Lebedev's team assembled it here, and the street that brings you to the gate still carries his name.

Nothing about Feofaniia advertises that. It is 150 hectares of oak forest on Kyiv's southern edge, with a cascade of ponds down the valley and the domes of St Panteleimon's Cathedral over the treetops. People come to walk, to fill bottles at the springs and to pray, often in the same afternoon.

From Lazarivshchyna to Feofaniia

The tract enters the record in 1471 as Lazarivshchyna. Tradition attaches the name to a monk called Lazar who kept bees here. For three centuries the land was church property — the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, Metropolitan Petro Mohyla, then the St Sophia monastery — until the treasury took it in 1776.

A Senate decree of 28 April 1802 granted the woods and the old apiary to Bishop Feofan Shyianov, who built a summer residence and a church. The locality took his name; Lazarivshchyna survives in archives. The Bolsheviks closed the monastery buildings in September 1930 and installed a farming commune and a children's colony. In August 1944 the forest passed to the Academy of Sciences — hence Lebedev's laboratory in a wrecked dormitory, and hence the Academy still running the park. Protected status as a garden-and-park monument of national significance came in 1972.

St Panteleimon's Cathedral

You see the cathedral first, and from furthest off. The diocesan architect Yevhen Yermakov laid its foundations on 16 July 1905; it was consecrated on 1 July 1914, weeks before the First World War. The form is pentacupolar — one heavy central dome, four tent-roofed domes at the corners, low galleries running right around the base — Russian Revival, and its closest relative is the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Tallinn.

Soviet power looted and closed it in the 1920s; German artillery worked on it in autumn 1941, when this ridge overlooked Kyiv's defensive line. What came back to the church in 1990 was a shell. A women's monastery was founded here in the early 2000s and the restoration has run ever since. The grounds are not a museum: nuns keep a daily round of services, so dress modestly and keep your voice down nearby.

The ponds and the springs

Five ponds step down the valley in a linked cascade, dug out of boggy hollows and now the spine of every walk here: footbridges run from one to the next, and on a still morning the cathedral turns up upside down in the water. Waterfowl moved back in once the ponds were restored.

More than ten springs rise in the woods. The best known are St Panteleimon's and the Blessed Virgin Mary's, both protected as natural monuments; one runs at a steady +4°C, which you learn with your hand, not off a sign. A bathing pool sits beside the springs near the monastery; pilgrims come from across the country to go under. Bring an empty bottle either way.

Oaks, understorey and the turn of the year

The forest is oak and hornbeam, and the oaks are the elders: most run 100 to 180 years, a few survivors past 300. Maples, ash and limes follow — 86 species of trees, shrubs and vines in all, only eleven of them conifers. At ground level: Red Book plants — bear's garlic, martagon lily, long-leaved helleborine. Entomologists count nine rare beetles and butterflies.

Spring smells of bear's garlic. July is about shade, which in Kyiv is no small matter. October brings photographers in numbers. Winter empties the place — snow on the lime avenue, ice on the ponds, almost nobody about. Go then if you can.

Visiting

The entrance is on vul. Akademika Lebedieva, 15 km south of the centre: 30 to 60 minutes, depending on traffic. Bus 38 runs from Demiivska metro, marshrutka 444 from Vystavkovyi Tsentr, 567D from Vydubychi; numbers change, so check a transport app before you set out. There is parking at the gate; it fills on warm Saturdays. Entry is no longer free — carry cash.

Allow an hour and a half at minimum. The lime avenue takes you down to the cathedral and the water; the stone heart-shaped platform above the valley is the park's most photographed spot. Wear shoes you can get muddy — much of the path network is earth and holds rain. Weekday mornings are near-empty, and the light is better.