Sofievka Park in Uman

On Monday, May 14, all of the temple missionaries (except Pres. & Sis Galbraith, who have been to this park, and who offered to stay and take care of the temple) rode in a 20 passenger van south of Kyiv 2 hours to Uman to visit the Sophia Park.

The park was established in 1796 by a rich polish magnate, Stanislav S Pototsky who also owned Uman at the time. (During a long period of time the love affair of Sophia and S. Pototskiy was illegal: she had two sons when they managed to divorce their former spouses and got married.) The idea of creating a park on his estate in romantic style using Roman and Greek mythology belonged to Sophia who was Greek.  The cost of the original park was estimated at roughly 15 million złoty, a fortune by contemporary standards. After 6 years of work the park was presented to Sophia on the day of her birthday in May 1802.  

A very talented polish military engineer Ludwig Metsel was the first architect of Sofievka. The peasants of Pototsky did the hardest work on this park. About 800 people worked in park every day. The land for the park was highly undeveloped with numerous ravines and divided by the Kamianka river. The main composition of the park is located by that river with a series of artificial basins and ponds

It is one of the most famous examples of garden-park art creations of the early 19th century. There are many scenic areas in the park including waterfalls, fountains, ponds and a stone garden. 


This is the lower lake.  The "snake" fountain is created by water flowing from the upper lake through a series of decreasingly-sized pipes.  

Water also flows from one lake to the other through a little river over a series of waterfalls.

This waterfall was barely a trickle the day we were there because of renovation on the water course.

This is the upper lake with a small island and pavilion in the middle. 

This huge granite rock at the right was moved by the serfs and balanced on three points to create a small cave underneath as shown

Many other granite rocks were moved to create "natural" places.

This oak is said to be 350 years old, obviously living before the park was created.  

There are greenhouses and buildings that currently house the national university of horticulture.  

The original marble statues are held in a museum and everything in the park is a copy. 

Borispol Branch "House"

Today we went with Pres. and Sister Christensen (counselor in the temple presidency) to attend the branch meetings in Borispol, southwest of Kyiv and where the international airport is. They drove a car and we arrived at the house where the branch meets.  It is a large building in the front of property which a family owns.  They have 3 other homes, outbuildings, and lots of garden space.  We were early and the landlady was outside on a beautiful sunny Sunday morning.  We started asking about the flowers and plants and she took us on a tour of the property.  Here are JD, Sis Christensen, and the landlady (in purple) starting to walk around the front and to the left of the main building.

The blue car belongs to the branch president.  This is to the left of the front meeting house. 

The metal frame was built by the son to protect plants. In the plastic bottles are eggplant starts.

Here is a greenhouse where tomato plants are still growing.

Other covered crops while it is still May and strawberries in blossom.

Red and black current bushes with fruit trees of all kinds.  Beehives for pollination and honey.

Outside his shop, the son (barely seen behind us) was welding a gate frame.

In the back I am looking through the door into the cellar where produce is kept for the winter.

Coming back around to the front of the building and in the front door.

Off the foyer is the branch president's office where he, his wife who is a translator, and Pres. Christensen are meeting.  Sis Christensen and I are looking in the meeting room which seats 30.

The kitchen and then up the stairs to the second level.  Much work has been put into the wood trim!

Only one room is used on the top floor, for the Primary children.  There are rooms where missionaries can live, but they are not used at present.  Some things are still unfinished.  But it is a nice facility for the branch, except the address is hard for investigators to find.

Storks

We had been traveling to Chernigov many times before I noticed the large nests situated on electric poles and other high spots in several of the village areas we pass.  By that time, I believe it was late in the Fall and the birds had all migrated south.  So I wondered if they were stork nests but didn't know.  The next Spring we saw the birds, looked up information on them, and began trying to photograph them through the windows of the moving marshrukas.  It has taken this long, with the special help of a recent drive with the Galbraiths when we could stop the car and take pictures, to have enough good photos to produce this blog.

I copied this information from the Smithsonian National Zoological Park website:
   White Storks are tall (1 m., 2.3-4.4 kg) long-necked wading birds with long bare red legs and a straight pointed red bill. The white plumage of the head, neck, and body contrasts with the black wing feathers highlighted with a sheen of purple and green iridescence. Sexes are similar in appearance, though males are slightly larger.  The European subspecies of the White Stork breeds in several discontinuous populations across much of Europe, the Middle East and west-central Asia.

   Storks are large birds that rely heavily on energy efficient soaring flight during migration. Soaring requires the presence of thermal air currents that are not found over water. White Storks are therefore reluctant to fly across large bodies of water such as the Mediterranean Sea to reach their wintering grounds in tropical Africa. They solve this problem by having the bulk of the European population split into two distinct migratory routes. Western birds cross the Mediterranean at the Straits of Gibraltar, while most of the eastern birds cross the Bosporus and circle around the Mediterranean through the Middle East.
   Breeding White Storks prefer lowland open habitats of wet pastures, flooded meadows, and shallow lakes and marshes with scattered trees for roosting and nesting. They have adapted to nest on man-made structures and forage in freshly plowed fields.  White Storks are highly opportunistic feeders who will consume a wide variety of prey items including insects, frogs, toads, tadpoles, fish, rodents, snakes, lizards, earthworms, mollusks, crustaceans, and, rarely, the chicks or eggs of ground-nesting birds. Foraging storks search for prey visually while walking deliberately with bill pointed toward the ground. 
   Though storks form monogamous pairs for the duration of the breeding season, they do not migrate or over-winter together. If the same pair reforms in successive years it is largely due to their strong attachment to their nest site.
   The female usually lays 3-5 eggs, more rarely up to seven. Parents share incubation duties for 33-34 days. Young chicks are covered with white down and have black bills. Both parents feed the young on the nest until they fledge at 8-9 weeks of age. Fledglings may continue to return to the nest site each evening to beg for food from their parents. Young birds reach sexual maturity in their fourth year. Banding records indicate that wild birds can live and reproduce successfully past 30 years of age.

You will notice that these photos were taken in the Spring when it was easier to see the nests before trees' leaves obscured the view.  It is also obvious that the pairs were nesting and it was well before any young birds had hatched.  I did notice some birds foraging on the ground, but never soon enough to snap a picture!  From Wikipedia I copied the following:
   A large population of White Storks breeds in central and eastern Europe. In a 2004/05 census, there were 52,500 pairs in Poland, 30,000 pairs inUkraine, 20,000 pairs in Belarus, 13,000 pairs in Lithuania (the highest known density of this species in the world), 10,700 pairs in Latvia, and 10,200 in Russia.... 
   Storks have little fear of humans if not disturbed, and often nest on buildings in Europe. In Germany, the presence of a nest on a house was believed to protect against fires. They were also protected because of the belief that their souls were human. German and Dutch households would encourage storks to nest on houses, sometimes by constructing purpose-built high platforms, to bring good luck. Poles, Lithuanians and Ukrainians believe that storks bring harmony to a family on whose property they nest.

Kyiv's Football (Soccer) "Olympic" Stadium

From the time we arrived in Kyiv there were already signs and talk about the 2012 European Football (Soccer) Championships to be held jointly in Poland and Ukraine with the finals in Kyiv.  The city was upgrading transportation systems and also their large football stadium.  We happened to get lost in the area of the construction and took these pictures just before Christmas, 2010.  I remember thinking they had a long ways to go to get it ready!

I didn't know the major seating and field was already there and this was an upgrade with better expensive seating and a cover over the seats.

This is what we saw this week.  We could walk around outside and other than some of the shops that will be open by the time of the games in June, everything was in order.  The stadium had an opening gala concert in October of 2011 and hosted a game in November of 2011

Some workmen were hanging from the suspended ceiling fixing something...!










We could not go inside and the best photo I could get through the entryways showed this kind of interior

These are photos I got online which show the stadium better.

The final round games will be held here in June with the European Cup Finals game on July 1.  The stadium seats 70,000.  We saw the regular stadium for the Kyiv Dynamo soccer club two weeks ago.  It seats about 10,000 and is used for everything except matches where a high turnout is expected.  Then this stadium is used.