Symbols of Kyiv: The Stories Behind the City's Icons

Where did Kyiv Day come from?

Kyiv is one of the oldest cities in Europe, yet many residents do not know that its official founding date is largely conventional.

The idea of celebrating Kyiv's 1,500th anniversary belonged to Valentyn Zghurskyi, who chaired the Kyiv City Council executive committee in the 1980s. To have the date approved, though many historians doubted it at the time, the city had to consult Moscow and even present it at a UNESCO session. A city as large and ancient as Kyiv needed an official starting point. The anniversary was celebrated in 1982, and then the holiday was more or less forgotten.

The idea of making Kyiv Day a tradition on the last weekend of May was suggested to the city leadership by a Kyivan, Viacheslav Lashuk. He later told a Kyiv publication how it happened:

"I was working in radio at the time. A group of poets and writers and I used to meet at the Svitlytsia cafe on Andriivskyi Descent. Once, at one of these gatherings, Salii asked what could be done in the city. Many of my friends had been to Montmartre in Paris and showed photos, full of admiration. I suggested celebrating Kyiv Day at the end of May, when the city is lush and green and the chestnuts are in bloom. I said that once we started, people would come from all over the country."

Chestnuts from the Balkans

Kyiv's chestnut trees are an undisputed symbol of the city. But did you know the tree is not native? Until the first half of the 19th century, no one here had heard of it. Saplings of these trees, known as horse chestnuts, were brought to Kyiv from the Balkans, their natural habitat in southern Europe, including Bulgaria and Greece. No one knows for sure where the first chestnuts were planted, but there are a couple of theories: one says on the grounds of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, the other on Bibikovskyi Boulevard (today's Taras Shevchenko Boulevard) for the visit of Tsar Nicholas I. Most Kyiv historians favor the latter.

The founders' boat

A symbol known to everyone is the boat in Navodnytskyi Park carrying the legendary founders of Kyiv: the brothers Kyi, Shchek and Khoryv and their sister Lybid. The boat's shape recalls the vessels of the 9th-12th centuries, when the swift ships of the Norsemen were the height of the technology of the day. In Kyivan Rus, boats were everyday transport, much as buses are now. According to legend, Kyi, Shchek and Khoryv lived as early as the 5th century, but unfortunately archaeologists have not found actual remains of local vessels from that time on river or sea beds.

Chicken Kyiv, the French way

At the top of Kyiv's culinary brands is, of course, Chicken Kyiv. It, too, came from far away. The dish is often traced to the French côtelette de volaille, attributed by some to the French chef Nicolas Appert. According to one story, from 1912 it appeared on the menu of the Merchants' Club in St. Petersburg as "Novo-Mikhailovsky cutlets," named after the nearby Mikhailovsky Palace. A little later, in 1918, under Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi, the cutlets were first prepared in Kyiv, but the dish did not catch on because of the difficult economic situation. It had to wait until 1947, when a Ukrainian delegation visited Paris. Among the many dishes served at a reception were those same chicken cutlets stuffed with butter. The republic's leaders liked them so much that the dish soon appeared in restaurants as "Chicken Kyiv."

"Halia" from Hungary

The Independence Monument, known simply as "Halia" to locals, appeared on Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in 2001. This relatively new symbol of Kyiv closely resembles the Millennium Monument on Heroes' Square in Budapest, begun in 1896 to mark Hungary's thousandth anniversary. Another monument very similar to Kyiv's Halia stands in Copenhagen: the column dedicated to Ivar Huitfeldt, a Danish naval hero of the Great Northern War.