Richard the Lionheart's Castle

Soon after the first tenants moved into No. 15 Andriivskyi Descent, they began complaining that the house howled — a low, mournful wail through the rooms and chimneys after dark. Within a few years the smart new block had a second, unshakeable identity: the haunted house of Kyiv's most famous street.

It is not a castle, and never was. What stands on the slope is a neo-Gothic rental block finished around 1904 — five storeys of turrets, spires and crenellations under a tall tower, now one of the street's most recognisable silhouettes. The English king whose name it carries had nothing to do with it — the first of the building's illusions.

Built to be rented, not haunted

The story starts around 1902, when a Kyiv contractor, Dmytro Orlov, bought a steep plot below St Andrew's Church and set about raising a five-storey rental block for well-off tenants. Building it was a struggle — a fire, permit trouble that stopped work more than once — but it was largely done by 1904, tenants arriving the year after.

Who designed it is an open question. No document names the architect on site; the design is usually traced to Robert Marfeld, from a scheme he had published in the journal Zodchiy — drawn, the story goes, for a building in St Petersburg, not a Kyiv hillside. Take it as attribution, not settled fact. Who lived here is clearer: the painters Hryhoriy Diadchenko and Fotiy Krasytsky, the sculptor Fedir Balavensky, the theology professor Stepan Holubiev, and, briefly, the office of a satirical magazine, Shershen.

The house that howled

As the tale grew, the owner was said to have fallen on ruin and the house to have changed hands; a comfortable block had become a ‘cursed castle’ almost overnight.

The best-known explanation is half detective story. Builders cheated of their wages, so it goes, packed eggshells into the chimney flues; caught in the draught, they resonated into that unearthly howl. Tired of it, Professor Holubiev is said to have inspected a flue, found the shells, and quietly killed the ghost. The tale survives in several versions and is best read as folklore — the house was, by every measure, a thoroughly modern place to live, with its own heating, plumbing and a cold cellar. A good reputation rarely beats a good ghost story.

A castle that was never a castle

The architecture is why you can't mistake it for anything else on the street. Neo-Gothic was an odd choice for Kyiv in the 1900s, and the house commits to it — assorted towers, sharp spires, toothed parapets and pointed windows, with figured brick breaking up the walls. The tall tower on the left gives the ‘castle’ its outline. The slope does the rest: from the foot of the Descent the house rears up sheer; from the terrace by St Andrew's Church above, it reads as something else.

The name is a 20th-century invention. Tradition credits the writer Viktor Nekrasov, who recalled in 1967 how as a boy he had cast the building as a castle out of Walter Scott's Ivanhoe — the novel in which Richard the Lionheart appears in disguise. A rival story names a real tenant, a shopkeeper called Richard who wore the nickname himself. Either way the 12th-century king is innocent: he died seven centuries before the first brick was laid.

Seeing it today

For much of the last century the castle stood empty and decaying. In the late 1990s an American businessman of Ukrainian descent, Yuriy Chopivsky, bought it to restore; the Ministry of Culture issued a permit for ‘restoration with adaptation’ in 2015. Progress has been slow — in November 2023 an attempt to raise a superstructure on the roof was condemned by officials as illegal work on a protected monument. Check the current state of play before counting on getting inside.

For now the pleasure is the outside, and it is enough. The castle sits at 15 Andriivskyi Descent, the cobbled street billed as the Montmartre of Kyiv, climbing from Podil to the Upper Town. Easiest is from below: a short walk from Kontraktova Ploshcha metro to the foot of the hill, then up past the craft stalls to the tower. Come from above, past St Andrew's Church, for a better reveal. Wear proper shoes; the old cobbles turn slick in rain.

While you're on the Descent

Don't stop at the castle. Directly above stands St Andrew's Church, Bartolomeo Rastrelli's blue-and-gold baroque set piece from the mid-18th century, with a terrace over Podil and the Dnipro. A few minutes uphill, the Landscape Alley lines up playful mosaic sculptures — a long cat-centipede, a Cheshire-cat slide. And the Descent itself rewards lingering: the Bulgakov Museum in the ‘House of the Turbins’, the Museum of One Street, and artists' studios along the hill.