Less radioactive parts of Kiev
Apr. 16th, 2008 07:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fivemackI have exhausted the cultural sites in my guidebook, though I'm getting the impression that it's not a particularly good guidebook. Sunday was the Sofiya Cathedral, an enormous green-domed edifice with eleventh-century wall paintings and mosaics inside, and a gilded carved-wood altar-screen. Someone in the nineteenth century installed cast-iron floor tiles with alternating motifs of crescent moons and Stars of David; a chance to trample competing religions underfoot rather than an ecumenical measure, I suspect. Some twelfth-century sculptures of dragons very much in Viking knotwork style: the hostel was filled with Scandanavians on Tuesday night, who were very keen to point out that Kievan Rus, and hence Ukraine, was essentially a Viking settlement project. I had a rather expensive steak that evening: Kindzmarauli Georgian wine would I suspect have been more a success than the Georgian wines on which I attempted to hook Cambridge two years back.
Monday took me to the parks along the west side of the Dneipr: the huge monastery complex, with a really striking collection of Ukrainian folk art in primary colours which reminded me of the best sort of Sixties children's-book illustrations, and some amazingly obsessively detailed flower-paintings by Katerina Bilokar, Ukraine's answer to Gauguin. It's about the only part of Kiev which has been recently painted; the walls are white, the roofs and the windowsills are a deep green, the spires are gilded, and the trees are painted white up to chest height. The lower monastery is famous for its mummified saints; these aren't really worth the visit, you get to walk by the light of a guttering candle along a two-foot-wide corridor, at the sides of which sit glass boxes containing sets of robes in which the saints are said to be.
Further along the parks you get to the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, with the gardens filled with field-guns, tanks and helicopters. There is an angle from which you see both the sixty-metre titanium statue of Mother Russia with sword and shield, and the ICBM that the museum has on display: a definite sense of 'never again, by whatever means that takes'.
I fell in with the crowd and ended up dancing and drinking until 3am, so Tuesday was distinctly subdued; coffee and a German Breakfast (bacon and eggs; the English Breakfast on offer was porridge with honey; I think the coffee shop needs some cultural consultancy); errands from one side of the city centre to the other to pick up tickets (I got the timing completely wrong; I could have been on the train to Lviv now but am in Kiev another 24 hours), a quick trip to the Marinski palace (blue, shut for renovation until 2010) and the Parliament (grey, glass dome reminiscent of the Reichstag, surrounded by journalists setting up for live pieces for the 7pm news, not open for visits).
Monday took me to the parks along the west side of the Dneipr: the huge monastery complex, with a really striking collection of Ukrainian folk art in primary colours which reminded me of the best sort of Sixties children's-book illustrations, and some amazingly obsessively detailed flower-paintings by Katerina Bilokar, Ukraine's answer to Gauguin. It's about the only part of Kiev which has been recently painted; the walls are white, the roofs and the windowsills are a deep green, the spires are gilded, and the trees are painted white up to chest height. The lower monastery is famous for its mummified saints; these aren't really worth the visit, you get to walk by the light of a guttering candle along a two-foot-wide corridor, at the sides of which sit glass boxes containing sets of robes in which the saints are said to be.
Further along the parks you get to the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, with the gardens filled with field-guns, tanks and helicopters. There is an angle from which you see both the sixty-metre titanium statue of Mother Russia with sword and shield, and the ICBM that the museum has on display: a definite sense of 'never again, by whatever means that takes'.
I fell in with the crowd and ended up dancing and drinking until 3am, so Tuesday was distinctly subdued; coffee and a German Breakfast (bacon and eggs; the English Breakfast on offer was porridge with honey; I think the coffee shop needs some cultural consultancy); errands from one side of the city centre to the other to pick up tickets (I got the timing completely wrong; I could have been on the train to Lviv now but am in Kiev another 24 hours), a quick trip to the Marinski palace (blue, shut for renovation until 2010) and the Parliament (grey, glass dome reminiscent of the Reichstag, surrounded by journalists setting up for live pieces for the 7pm news, not open for visits).
