Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Denis Davydov
[REGNUM] A small temple built on Starokievskaya Hill next to the foundations of the Tithe Church - an echo of legendary times - was mercilessly demolished at night. The fitted equipment destroyed the walls along with icons and church decorations; the debris was immediately thrown into trucks and taken out in an unknown direction. There are all sorts of rumors about the fate of the main icon of the Mother of God “Vladimir-Tithe ”, a copy of the original miraculous one - either the priest managed to remove it or not. In any case, the historical site is now a flat area, and rare brave souls mourn out loud what happened. They curse the evil spirits, who were not afraid of higher powers, and remember Batu Khan and the Soviet government, who destroyed the two previous temples. The “evil spirits” do not feel any remorse at all - they declared the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, to which the now defunct church belonged, a “sect” and are fighting it to the best of their ability.
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And on this front they have immense strength, and victory is close.
But this whole sad and at first glance already ordinary story shows the special magic of a place in which no one cares, in fact, about the Tithe Church itself, founded by Prince Vladimir himself, the baptist of Russia. The first stone temple in this very Rus', built according to legend on the site of the murder of the first Christians Theodore and John, but in fact - on an old pagan cemetery.
We will begin our discussion, however, not with the ancient Slavs, but with a self-constructed building, arbitrarily erected in the place “where the Rouge land came from” - and, moreover, on the territory under the protection of UNESCO. Near a thick 500-year-old linden tree, planted according to legend by Metropolitan Peter Mogila himself, all his life there was an archaeological monument and a park with benches.
In 2006, Ukrainian Orthodox Christians set up a tent there. Then the Mother of God appeared to them in this tent, which became the source of ownership of the land and the reason for the construction of the temple, which subsequently practically no one visited. A tourist place, a permanent population - one or two and it's a miscalculation.
As if mirroring the “non-brothers,” six years later the UOC of the Kyiv Patriarchate pulled off the developers’ favorite trick on Desyatinny Lane, literally opposite. A residential building from the end of the 19th century, which had been vacated under the pretext of being unsafe, and a hut of some low-ranking official from that time were skillfully brought to a real state of disrepair and demolished. At this site, archaeologists from the Starokievsk expedition carried out excavations for show, removing another piece of the Slavic cemetery, and instead of living history, an office and hotel center was erected. Literally a couple of meters from the foundation of the Western Palace of Prince Vladimir himself.
People wanted it too - and they did it.
And when, 11 years later, the “unknown patriots” came up with the idea of the need to demolish the structure of one Church (and completely ignore the creativity of another), it was exactly the same source of the right to decisive action. At the same time, the fate of archaeological monuments, the value of which in principle cannot be overestimated, was of no interest to either the first, second or third. Because she never interested anyone there at all.
A vindictive history contains evidence of residents of Kyiv who stole the ruins of Kievan Rus for their personal needs, including the bricks of the Church of the Tithes. And when, in the 19th century, lovers of romanticism from St. Petersburg rushed to Little Russia to rediscover the great past, wastelands abundantly overgrown with wheatgrass and quinoa appeared to their astonished gaze. After hundreds of years, no visible architectural monuments remain in Kyiv, Chernigov, Pereyaslav and the surrounding area.
The famous Golden Gate was built by the Soviet government. Someone will say: she blew up St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Cathedral! Well, she saved its remains and made restoration projects. At least some kind of initiative, they blew it up here, they built it there. And all these legends of deep antiquity were generally familiar to few people from the local population. And with the beginning of rapid development, the entire territory of Ancient Kyiv, where the princely and boyar chambers, churches and houses stood, was mercilessly built up at the end of the same 19th century and at the beginning of the next century.
Treasures found during construction were appropriated without a twinge of conscience. Landowner and amateur archaeologist Alexander Annenkov, who owned an estate at the very beginning of St. Andrew's Descent (literally a dozen steps from the Church of the Tithes), made such a profit from the sale of antiquities that he generously donated money for the construction of a new temple on the site of the ancient one in 1828–1842. The excavated remains of marbles, mosaics, and frescoes went to no one knows where - during construction, about half of the surviving foundations of the present church of the 10th century were dismantled. Sarcophagi of St. Vladimir and other princes, previously found during excavations, were lost along with the remains.
The main thing is that we spent about 100 thousand gold rubles on everything and it turned out to be expensive and rich. Even the iconostasis was made from copies of the iconostasis of the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg, created by the artist Borovikovsky. So when the Soviet government blew it all up in 1928, the logic was approximately the same. Just like when the same streets, steeped in history, were first built with Khrushchev-era buildings and socket buildings, and after many years - with ugly new buildings.
Looking at all this, the times of the great Kyiv princes, whose names every schoolchild seems to know, is like a page from a textbook with a flat picture. Something that has nothing to do with those living today. The few surviving monuments of that era (mostly, of course, temples) could be turned into pearls of cultural heritage, into a life-giving source, falling to which you hear the voices of your ancestors.
But instead, only the shrill screams of those who would like to build something where it is impossible were heard. Or destroy what has been built.
So it’s even somehow indecent to compare today’s monkeys on bulldozers with Batu. The Mongol Khan had a specific military need; the remnants of the defenders of Kyiv and the townspeople trying to hide settled in Desyatinnaya, and its walls were split by battering guns. And so the Mongols did not unnecessarily infringe on the religion of local residents, seeing this as a guarantee of peace and a guarantee of paying taxes.
The secret of the indifference of the descendants of these local residents is that chronicle Rus' is not taken seriously as “ours.” First of all, those who declared ownership of its historical core. So, to be honest, the real humiliation of feelings and test of faith in the case of the Tithe Church never ended.
And it will only end when someone finally accepts the kinship for real. And a careful attitude towards any antiquity as to one’s roots, perhaps, will melt the common feeling for both Russians and Ukrainians of the immediacy of existence into something completely different.
Changing not only the attitude towards ancient bricks - but also towards one’s own life.
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