The first church the Rus ever built in stone stood on this hilltop for 250 years, and today you can walk across its footprint without noticing. A few low outlines are set into the paving, tracing the plan of walls that vanished nearly eight centuries ago, in a quiet square beside the National Museum of History of Ukraine. This is the site of the Church of the Tithes — raised by Volodymyr the Great to mark the baptism of a whole state, and brought down when the Mongols sacked Kyiv in 1240. There is little here to photograph. What there is, is the ground itself.
Volodymyr the Great made Christianity the state religion in 988, and within a year his builders broke ground on something Kyiv had never seen: a church of masonry, in a city built of wood. It went up on the citadel atop Starokyivska Hora between roughly 989 and 996, and was consecrated in 996. It was dedicated to the Dormition of the Mother of God, though almost no one used that name.
The name that stuck was about money. To maintain the church, Volodymyr set aside a tithe — a tenth of his revenues — and that endowment, the first of its kind in Rus, gave the building its lasting nickname: Desiatynna, the Church of the Tithes. For a few decades, until Yaroslav the Wise raised St Sophia nearby, it was the chief church of the realm.
By the measure of 10th-century Eastern Europe, the church was vast — cross-domed, carried on six pillars, later wrapped on three sides by galleries, across some 1,700 square metres. Byzantine craftsmen laid mosaic floors and covered the walls with frescoes; columns, capitals and carved parapets were cut from imported marble and local pyrophyllite, the pinkish-violet slate of the region. There was so much marble that contemporaries simply called it the marble church — a room of gilded light and polished stone unlike anything in a city of timber.
The church was a dynastic pantheon from the outset. Volodymyr the Great was laid here in a marble sarcophagus when he died in 1015, beside his wife Anna, a Byzantine princess and sister of the emperor Basil II. By tradition the relics of Princess Olha — Volodymyr's grandmother, and the first Christian among Kyiv's rulers — were moved here too. None of it was hidden: Thietmar of Merseburg recorded that the sarcophagi stood in plain view in the middle of the church. In the 1630s Metropolitan Petro Mohyla, tending the ruins, turned up a sarcophagus identified — rightly or not — as Volodymyr's own.
The church died with old Kyiv. In December 1240 the Mongol army of Batu Khan closed on the city, and the defence was fierce and hopeless. When the walls were breached, the last defenders and townspeople fell back to the Church of the Tithes — the strongest stone structure in Kyiv, and the final refuge. It did not hold. By the account handed down to us, the vaults gave way under the crush of people and belongings hauled inside. Historians still argue the trigger — the sheer weight, the Mongols' siege engines, old cracks weakened by earlier repairs, or all three at once. The date, at least, is settled: 6 December 1240.
For centuries the ruins simply lay there. Between 1828 and 1842 the Russian imperial administration cleared what remained and built a large new Desiatynna church over the site, in a heavy Russian-Byzantine style by the St Petersburg architect Vasily Stasov; the Soviet authorities pulled it down in 1935. The foundations were finally excavated in 1938–1939, when Mykhailo Karger's expedition traced the whole plan and recovered fragments of mosaic floor, fresco and carved tombs; more than a thousand finds now sit in Kyiv's museums, chiefly the neighbouring National Museum of History of Ukraine.
There was one last chapter. A wooden church raised beside the foundations in the late 2000s by a parish of the Moscow-linked Orthodox Church became the subject of a long court fight; ruled an unauthorised structure on museum land, it was dismantled on the night of 17 May 2024. What stands today is what the site was meant to show: bare, conserved outlines of the foundations, laid into a quiet square.
Come for the reading of the place rather than the spectacle. Find the outlines in the paving and walk the perimeter of the vanished church — apses, walls and doorway all legible underfoot. An information board carries a QR code that loads a full augmented-reality reconstruction on your phone — you can raise the church back over its own footprint as you stand there. Then step next door to the National Museum of History of Ukraine, where the real finds give the bare plan its flesh.
The site crowns Starokyivska Hora, the oldest core of Kyiv, on vul. Volodymyrska beside the museum. It's a short walk on from St Andrew's Church and the head of the Andriyivsky Descent — treat it as the opening of that route, not a five-minute stop.
Собор звели у 989-996 роках давньоруські та візантійські майстри на кошти великого князя Володимира Святославовича. Саме його десятина, тобто десята частина княжих доходів, і дала назву храму. Залишки фундаменту Десятинної церкви разом із градом Володимира мають статус пам'ятки національного значення.
Для мене це справжнє місце сили.
Тут красиво, спокійно й дуже затишно.
Тут усе про Україну-Русь і про наших славетних предків. Десятинна церква, або храм Успіння Пресвятої Богородиці, - одна з найдавніших святинь Києва. Її звели наприкінці X століття за князя Володимира Святославича, а назва походить від десятини, яку він виділив на будівництво й утримання. Вважається першою кам'яною церквою Київської Русі. На жаль, храм не вцілів після монгольського штурму 1240 року, але залишки фундаменту й досі мають велике історичне значення. Це місце справді нагадує про величну минувшину.
