St Andrew's Church, Kyiv

St Andrew's Church crowns a steep hill above the old Podil district of Kyiv, its green-and-gold silhouette visible from the river and from far along the Andriyivskyy Descent, the winding cobbled street named after it. It is one of the finest buildings of the Baroque in Ukraine. Empress Elizabeth of Russia ordered it in 1744; the design came from Bartolomeo Rastrelli, the Italian-born court architect also responsible for the Winter Palace, and construction was directed on site by Ivan Michurin. The exterior went up between 1747 and 1754, while the interior was not completed until 1767.

The church is compact rather than vast: about 32 metres long, 20 metres wide and some 50 metres high. A single large dome rises over the body of the church, accompanied by smaller decorative cupolas, and the whole stands on a high platform so that it seems to float above the slope. Inside, the iconostasis was also designed by Rastrelli and carved in Saint Petersburg, and more than a thousand sheets of gold leaf were used in the gilding. The church has no bells. The hill itself carries an older story: tradition holds that the Apostle Andrew climbed it, raised a cross and foretold that a great city would grow there.

Michurin's surveys found that unstable ground lay only about 13–14 metres down, and the foundations have caused concern ever since; a major restoration between 2015 and 2020 addressed them along with the interior. Since 2018 the church has belonged to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople as its stauropegion in Kyiv. Kyiv itself, founded on the hills above the Dnipro more than a thousand years ago, was the centre of medieval Kyivan Rus' and is today the capital of Ukraine.

Getting there

The church stands in central Kyiv, about 0.6 km from the city centre, at the top of the Andriyivskyy Descent. Kyiv's main international airport, Boryspil (KBP), lies about 29 km east of the city.