Great Lavra Bell Tower

Ninety-six and a half metres of gilded brick, stacked in four tiers that grow lighter as they climb — when Johann Gottfried Schädel topped out the Great Lavra Bell Tower in 1745, nothing of its kind in the Russian Empire stood taller, and nothing would for over a century. It still fixes the skyline of Pechersk.

The Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra around it fills whole books; this is about the tower alone. It earns it: an 18th-century engineering gamble, four storeys of classical columns, famous bells, a hand-wound clock — and, at the top of 374 steps, one of the widest views in Kyiv.

How a fire made Schädel's tower

It starts with a fire. The Lavra's wooden bell towers burned in the great blaze of 1718, and the monastery wanted a replacement that would never catch again. Work on the brick tower began in 1731, southwest of the Dormition Cathedral, whose bells it was built to carry — which is why Kyivans still call it the bell tower of the Dormition Cathedral, the cathedral's voice over the hills. It was finished around 1744–1745.

Schädel made one decisive change. Handed a squat, five-tier design, he cut it to four tiers and gave it, of all things, another ten metres or so of height. The tower didn't sink under the edit — it stretched, and turned elegant. Art historians often call the result the first full expression of ‘order Baroque’ in Kyiv — classical columns used in earnest, at colossal scale.

Four tiers, read from the ground up

Read it from the pavement upward and the tower works like a lesson in stone. The first tier is the heavy one — rusticated to look like rough-cut blocks, its walls about eight metres thick, doing the unglamorous work of holding up everything above. By the reserve's reckoning it swallowed something like five million bricks, on a base nearly twenty-nine metres across.

Then it loosens. The second tier rings itself with thirty-two Doric columns set between eight windows; the third steps up to sixteen paired Ionic columns and begins to feel airborne; the fourth lightens into Corinthian, the most ornate of the orders. A gilded pear-shaped cupola and cross catch the sun at the summit. Look closely and you'll find glazed ceramic inlay worked across the stone — the note of Ukrainian Baroque warmth that keeps the whole thing from reading as a dry drill of columns.

374 steps to the best view in Pechersk

For most visitors the real draw is the climb: 374 narrow, old steps to the upper galleries, and the ascent is half the reward — each turn frames the city differently through an arch or a window. At the top the gold domes of the Lavra lie almost directly beneath you, the Dnipro spreads out with its bridges, and the wooded Pechersk slopes fall away below.

One honest caveat. The summit has opened and closed over the years; it shut for restoration and reopened in late 2023, and now keeps regular daytime hours — but it has gone dark before, and numbers up top are capped, so ask at the excursion office on the day. If the climb is closed, the terraces of the Upper Lavra still hand you the Dnipro.

Bells, a Kremlin-style clock, and a 62-centimetre lean

A bell tower lives by its bells, and this one once hung around thirteen of them. The celebrated one was the Uspensky bell, cast in 1732 by Ivan Motorin — the founder whose family also produced Moscow's colossal Tsar Bell. Most of the historic bells were lost in the 1930s; what rings today is a later chapter.

Higher up sits a chiming clock: a 4.5-tonne mechanism installed in 1903, modelled on the Kremlin's, wound by hand and accurate, they say, to within ten seconds. It stopped once — in September 1941, when the neighbouring Dormition Cathedral was blown up in the war. The cathedral came down; the tower stood. And it stands a little crooked, leaning about 62 centimetres to the northeast, enough for locals to nickname it Kyiv's Leaning Tower.

Finding it in the Upper Lavra

The tower stands in the Upper Lavra of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra reserve, at vul. Ivana Mazepy 21 in Pechersk. The grounds are open daily; the climb is a separate ticket. Give the Lavra half a day at least — it swallows a full one easily — and dress for a working monastic and museum site: covered shoulders, a headscarf for women in the churches.

Right beside the tower is the Dormition Cathedral it was built to serve, levelled in 1941 and rebuilt in our own century. A few minutes downhill the Near Caves begin, the hushed underground labyrinth of the monastery — the exact opposite of the open sky up top. Between them you get both halves of the Lavra: the long view and the deep one.