Qualla: St Volodymyr's Cathedral

St Volodymyr's Cathedral: Introduction

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. For much of the Soviet period, one of Kyiv's most beautiful churches was officially a museum of atheism. Inside, under seven cupolas and across walls covered in gold-ground frescoes, the state displayed exhibits meant to argue that God did not exist, in a building constructed for the express purpose of worshiping Him. St Volodymyr's Cathedral had been raised to celebrate faith, narrowly escaped the wrecking crews that leveled so many Kyiv churches, and was made instead to serve the argument against itself. The murals stayed on the walls the whole time. Whatever the placards said, the saints kept watching.

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

St Volodymyr's Cathedral: A Million Bricks

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jorge Láscar from Australia, CC BY 2.0. The cathedral began as a milestone. In 1852 a Moscow metropolitan proposed a grand new church in Kyiv to mark the nine hundredth anniversary of the baptism of Kyivan Rus', the moment in the tenth century when Prince Volodymyr the Great converted his realm to Christianity. Donatio...

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Image: Jorge Láscar from Australia | CC BY 2.0

St Volodymyr's Cathedral: Painted by Masters

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The building is only the frame. What stops visitors is the interior, and it took until 1896 to finish, fourteen years after the walls went up. Mosaicists came from Venice. The vast program of frescoes was directed by Professor Adrian Prakhov and executed by a roster of celebrated...

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Image: Public domain

St Volodymyr's Cathedral: The Church That Survived

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Іванко1 at Ukrainian Wikipedia., Public domain. The twentieth century tried the cathedral hard. It risked damage in the fighting of 1920, and under Soviet rule it escaped demolition only narrowly, though it could not escape closure and its long humiliation as a museum of religion and atheism. When the Bolsheviks destroyed the ...

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Image: The original uploader was Іванко1 at Ukrainian Wikipedia. | Public domain

St Volodymyr's Cathedral: A Living Cathedral

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dezidor, CC BY 3.0. With the Soviet Union gone, the cathedral's stewardship became contested among branches of Ukrainian Orthodoxy, and control ultimately passed to the Kyiv Patriarchate. Since the unification council of December 2018 it has belonged to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Through all th...

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Image: Dezidor | CC BY 3.0