Kytaieve: Kyiv's Hidden Valley of Ponds and Caves

Surrounded by wooded hills above the Dnipro lies one of the most beautiful places in Kyiv: Kytaieve.

The area sits on a spur of land where you can see nature in its most unspoiled beauty. On top of that, there is a lovely cascade of picturesque ponds known as the Kytaiv Ponds (there are up to three of them here). It is a rewarding place to walk in both winter and summer.

On the so-called Kytai Hill there once stood a fortress, protected by a moat and rampart on the northwest and by water on the other sides.

Not much of it has survived; the fortress site is now a deserted hilltop, though remains of the 9th–11th century hillfort and fortifications can still be made out. In the 11th century, during construction work, the moat and rampart on the hill crumbled. People went on living in the settlement that grew up around it even after the Mongol invasion, into the 15th century.

In the 15th century, monks of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra founded a cave monastery on Kytai Hill, along with an above-ground Lavra skete (hermitage). It was closed in 1930 and revived in the early 1990s.

The Holy Trinity Church was completed in 1767 (architect Stepan Kovnir). Its bell tower was dismantled in the 1930s and rebuilt in the 1990s.

The caves were discovered in 1857. In 1910–1912 an expedition led by A. D. Ertel found several underground galleries whose walls still bore inscriptions in Old Slavonic letters.

In 1921, under the Bolsheviks, several buildings in Kytaieve were confiscated and turned into a shelter for "defective children." It should be noted that an orphanage for children of soldiers killed in World War I already existed there at the time. The documents say nothing about what later became of these shelters. In 1930 the authorities handed the Kytaieve grounds over to the All-Union Research Institute of Fruit and Berry Growing. In 1933 the staff was dismissed and the hermitage closed.

Kytaieve had a hard fate during World War II as well. It was turned into a stronghold, and bloody battles were fought here involving the 147th Rifle Division under Lieutenant Colonel S. K. Potekhin. By the end of the war almost nothing was left of the hermitage, and no one intended to restore it.

Church services resumed in 1991, and restoration began on the stone altar of the Holy Trinity Church, built in 1763–1767 in the Ukrainian Baroque style.