St Volodymyr's Cathedral

There are some 3,000 square metres of mural inside St Volodymyr's, and they are the reason to come. Behind a yellow-brick facade and seven gilded domes on Taras Shevchenka Boulevard, a working cathedral doubles as one of Kyiv's great picture galleries — walls, vaults and piers painted almost end to end by Viktor Vasnetsov, Mikhail Nesterov and the team of artists brought together here in the 1880s and 1890s.

The cathedral was raised to mark the 900th anniversary of the Baptism of Rus, and dedicated to the prince who brought it about, Volodymyr the Great. The jubilee, though, fell in 1888, and the building wasn't finished until 1896 — eight years late for the date it was built to celebrate. Today it is the cathedral of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, and for most visitors it works on two levels at once, as a place of prayer and a monument of nineteenth-century painting.

Thirty-four years and a wall full of cracks

The idea took shape around 1852, when Metropolitan Filaret pressed for a great church to honour the coming anniversary. Money arrived by public subscription from far and wide, the first stone was laid in 1862, and then the trouble started. By 1864 the walls had risen to the level of the domes and split with deep cracks; the structure looked unable to carry the weight above it, and work stopped for the better part of a decade.

Building resumed in 1875, by order of Alexander II, and the masonry was finished in 1882. Fitting out the interior took another fourteen years. The original design was Ivan Shtrom's; the version that actually went up belongs to the academician Oleksandr Beretti, with several other architects solving problems along the way. One compromise is legible from the street — a plan for thirteen cupolas was cut back to seven.

Vasnetsov's Kyiv, painted floor to vault

The decoration was directed by the art historian Adrian Prakhov, who assembled the painters and set the programme. The lead hand was Viktor Vasnetsov, who spent about a decade on the main nave and apse. His Mother of God — the Virgin standing on a gold ground in the central apse, the Child in her arms — became one of the most widely reproduced images in Orthodox art, copied into churches far beyond Kyiv.

Vasnetsov also painted Christ Pantocrator in the main dome, a vast Last Judgement on the west wall and the Baptism of Rus, along with a gallery of saints and princes that runs from Princess Olga to Volodymyr himself. Mikhail Nesterov added the Nativity and Resurrection scenes; Wilhelm Kotarbiński, the Svedomsky brothers, Mykola Pymonenko and Mikhail Vrubel worked on further compositions and ornament. The painting is oil on prepared plaster, and it is the sheer coverage of it that stops people in the doorway.

Neo-Byzantine by design

The building is a deliberate throwback: a six-pier, three-apse church modelled on the old cathedrals of Kyivan Rus and dressed in the neo-Byzantine manner that was fashionable when it went up. Seven gilded domes cluster around a dominant central one, and the warm yellow brick is banded with arcading and pilasters, so a massive building reads as surprisingly light. It runs about 55m long and rises 49m to the cross on the main dome. Inside, the rows of piers and arches do real work — they divide the space into the broad surfaces the painters used as their canvas. The architecture is, in effect, a frame.

Relics and a living cathedral

For all the art on the walls, this is first a functioning church. Since the 1930s it has held the relics of Saint Barbara, the early martyr whom pilgrims petition for health and protection, and those of Makarii, a fifteenth-century metropolitan of Kyiv. Through the 1990s the cathedral was the mother church of the Kyiv Patriarchate; since the unification council of December 2018 it has belonged to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Entry is free, and the doors are usually open from early morning to evening.

If you have come for the murals, steer clear of the main services and the big feast days, when the church fills and craning your neck to look up is neither easy nor especially welcome. Weekday mornings are the quietest. Dress modestly — this is an active place of worship, not a museum, and photography is often restricted.

Getting there and what's nearby

The cathedral sits in the thick of academic Kyiv, and it is easy to reach: the metro station Universytet, on the red line, is a two-minute walk, and the domes are in view the moment you cross the road. Skip the car — this is dense centre with little parking.

It also anchors one of the city's best short walks. The Fomin Botanical Garden lies straight across the boulevard, good in spring for magnolia and lilac; a little further are the red university building, the shaded Shevchenko Park with its monument to the poet, the reconstructed Golden Gate and the National Opera. Half a day is enough to string them together, with cafes at every turn for a pause.