We worked in the temple on the morning shift. They were getting adjusted to our time zone (9 hours ahead of Rexburg) and could sleep, get up and ready for the day and come to our apartment for brunch/lunch. Then we went on outings in the afternoon/evening. [Most of these places we had visited before and have a previous descriptive Post which will be referenced by date.]
On Thursday we went to see the famous Motherland statue on the hills overlooking the Dneiper river. We rode a bus and then the Metro subway. On our way we passed by a war memorial to those who fought and died in WWII. [May 2011--WWII Victory Day in Kyiv]
We also walked by the memorial for victims of the "Holdomar", the Soviet-imposed famine of the 1930's when millions died from starvation. [Nov 2010--The Ukraine Famine of 1932-33]
We walked a long way to this huge Motherland statue. [Nov 2010--Kyiv's Motherland Statue] Unfortunately we just missed the time for entering the museum in the base underneath it and so we walked around and took pictures.
We saw some of the war vehicles displayed nearby.
Then we enjoyed dinner at a nearby Ukrainian restaurant. [Sept 2010--A Visit to a Ukrainian Restaurant]
On Friday we went to the Museum of Folk Architecture at Pyrohovo. [Sept 2010--Museum of Folk Architecture] We drove with a guide around various villages representative of the regions in Ukraine and their unique building styles complete with homes and churches, most of which have been dismantled and moved to this location just outside Kyiv (not far from our temple site)
The interior of the church above
A school house
These are various natural beehives!
The interior of the very tall tower of the church above
Various windmills from many parts of Ukraine, used for grinding flour.
On our way home we stopped at the Novus grocery store and selected items from the deli for our dinner; it was sometimes hard to decide so we picked many options!
Saturday we went to the Lavra. [Oct 2010--Kyiv's Monastery of the Caves] Natural caves in the hills above the Dneiper river began to be used in 1051 by solitary monks who lived and died there. More joined them and a monastery developed, later with buildings and churches.
The bell tower has been covered for restoration for a year. One of it's large bells was being rung and visitors were glad to hear it and also to feel it's vibrations!
We walked down the covered walkway to the lower caves where "relics" of dead monks are venerated.
After walking through the caves, we stopped for a snack. Charlotte had been given an apple by one of the priests as we exited the caves and she was delighted to eat it. We had brought some other apples to cut up and eat along with cookies, etc.
These are statues of Cyril and Methodious, brothers and monks from Thessalonika who lived in the mid 800's, traveled from Byzantium to the region around the Black Sea, invented the "Cyrillic" alphabet to express the oral Slavic language and then translated the Bible into "old Slavonic" so it could be read and understood by Slavic people. The Lavre became a center for copying and preserving the written and printed holy words and has many musuems. Perhaps an unlikely but fascinating museum is that of miniatures made by one Ukrainian craftsman. Each round display contains a miniature viewed by a microscope, such as the chess set on the head of a pin and the gold dragonfly with an eye that is a working miniature clock! Jeff took the pictures with his iPhone!
We took a bus and the Metro to the other side of downtown past the replica of the "Golden Gate" entrance to the old walled city of Kyiv. [July 2011--The Upper Old City} The gate was never golden; when approaching it visitors could see the golden domes of the of cathedrals like---
the St. Sophia Cathedral with it's imposing bell tower gate.
We walked across the plaza past the statue to Bogdan Khmelnetsky
and statues to Princess Olga, (the first Christian convert among Kievan Rus rulers in about 950 who influenced her grandson Vladimir), Cyril & Methodious, and St Andrew. We were heading to buy souvenirs. Nearby is St. Andrew's Cathedral where there had been lots of reconstruction work blocking access to it. On this pre-Easter holiday weekend, it was open and we were glad to go inside. It is obviously built in a more ornate Baroque style.
Then we bought souvenirs. Here are Sam and Oliver with Kyiv Dynamo soccer shirts, hats and skarf
and Charlotte with her stacking doll painted like a cat in front of the St Michael's bell tower.
Walking back downtown we passed an old man playing a bandura [April 2011--The Bandura]
and also went through the main Independence Square
with it's triumphal arch to St. Michael, patron saint of Kyiv
and the tall Independence column, all above a huge underground multi-level shopping mall which is the reason for all of the glass skylights.
We finally arrived at the location of our dinner stop--Pizata Khata, a Ukrainian buffet chain.
After eating we thought we could roam a little farther up through the alleyway, to a small park where we were surprised that the trees had been decorated by hanging wooden pysanky, Ukrainian Easter eggs. [Sept 2011--Pysanky--Ukrainian Eggs] I found out this was the second Easter that children had been invited to make these eggs as a way to help them learn the old folk art, and then they had been displayed this way. Through the park is the Ukrainian Drama Theater
and past that to the right, up a hill and across the street is the large white building of the Secretariat of the President of the Ukraine with the back side of the House with Chimeras on this side of the street. We went to see this unusual building! [May 2011--National Headquarters in Kyiv]
We were very tired by the time we rode back "home" on the subway!
On Sunday it was our Easter but also the day that the saints in eastern Europe enjoyed general conference that had been recorded the week previous. So the international branch that meets in the church building next to the temple met at 10a for a brief sacrament service which we attended. Afterwards they watched general conference and we left since we had watched the sessions the week before. We had an Easter dinner and then went for a final walk downtown. We took the Metro to the side of the Dneiper river. Then we rode this funicular to the top of the hill. [July 2011--The Upper Old City]
That brought us to the Cathedral of St. Michael. The Orthodox church was celebrating Palm Sunday. [April 2011--Easter] Their holy day calendar is different, usually by 2 weeks, but this time by only one. [Dec 2010--Churches, Calendars and Holidays]
These were examples of the kinds of ornaments on the top of the church.
Services were already over in the morning but for the many who were visiting during the day, a choir was singing. It was lovely to hear inside the domed space. We weren't the only ones taking pictures inside. In fact, in a smaller chapel nearby a ceremony was taking place with a baby and being photographed and recorded. (In the foreground is the head of Eleanor covered with the special pink/purple skarf she bought as a souvenir!)
We had to take a picture of the "home" stadium for the Kyiv Dynamo soccer team.
The boy playing a type of trumpet was 7. This is the small orchestra that played.
