Vydubychi Monastery

Prince Vsevolod's monastery

The Vydubychi Monastery was founded by Vsevolod Yaroslavych, a son of Yaroslav the Wise, next to his country residence. It is first mentioned in the Primary Chronicle under 1070. At first it was known by its founder's name and later by the name of the area. Legend links that name to the baptism of Kyiv: as the idol of Perun was thrown into the Dnipro, townspeople ran along the bank calling on the god to "swim out", and the place where it washed ashore became Vydubychi. A more sober explanation points to the ferry here, where people stepped ashore from dugout boats.

It became the family monastery of Vsevolod and his son Volodymyr Monomakh, and a centre of chronicle writing. In 1116 its abbot Sylvestr compiled one of the versions of the Primary Chronicle here, and the Kyiv Chronicle was written here in the late 12th century.

St Michael's Cathedral and the sliding slope

The oldest building is St Michael's Cathedral, built in 1070–1088. It stood right at the edge of the bluff, and the Dnipro kept eating away at the bank. In 1199–1200 the builder Petro Myloneh, working for Prince Riuryk Rostyslavych, raised a massive retaining wall, praised in the chronicle by the Vydubychi abbot Moisei. It held the danger off for centuries, but in the 16th century a landslide carried away the eastern part of the church, apses and all. In 1766–1769 the surviving part was closed off with a new wall designed by Mykhailo Yurasov. So only the western half of the great princely cathedral stands today, and the outline of the lost half is known from excavations.

A Baroque ensemble of the Hetmanate

The monastery flourished again in the late 17th century under the patronage of Mykhailo Myklashevskyi, colonel of the Starodub Regiment. He paid for the five-domed St George's Cathedral, built in 1696–1701, which is the centrepiece of the ensemble and one of the finest churches of the Ukrainian Baroque, as well as the refectory with the Church of the Saviour. Metropolitan Varlaam Yasynskyi consecrated the cathedral in 1701. In 1727–1733 Hetman Danylo Apostol funded a bell tower with a gate church, later raised by a tier to a design by Andrii Melenskyi. This is the ensemble Taras Shevchenko drew in 1844 for his album Picturesque Ukraine.

The monastery cemetery holds the graves of the art patrons Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko, the educator Kostiantyn Ushynskyi and General Yakiv Handziuk, commander of the 1st Ukrainian Corps, who was killed in 1918.

Soviet losses and revival

The monastery was closed in the late 1920s. In 1936 the carved Baroque iconostases of St George's and St Michael's were hacked apart and burned. The buildings became storerooms for the Academy of Sciences and later housed the Institute of Archaeology. On the night of 26 November 1968 a fire destroyed the entire interior of St George's, together with a collection of early printed books kept there, and brought down the domes. The architect Raisa Bykova restored the ensemble between the 1960s and the 1980s.

Monastic life returned in the 1990s, when the monastery was given to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate. Archimandrite Epifaniy (Dumenko) served as its superior before becoming head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2018, and Vydubychi has belonged to that church since then. The Vydubychi choir was one of the first to sing the liturgy in Ukrainian again.

What to see

The monastery sits in a deep hollow between the Pechersk hills and the Dnipro, with the Hryshko National Botanical Garden on three sides. The best viewpoint is the lilac garden on the slope above. In May you see St George's through the blossom, with the river and the Left Bank behind it. Down below, walk around St Michael's, where the seam between the 11th-century masonry and the 1760s wall is easy to spot, look into the Refectory Church of the Saviour and stroll through the old cemetery.