despite teaching a full schedule, i was lucky enough to have two afternoons a week where i finished teaching at 1230...when bo was in town, we took advantage of those afternoons to get out and see some of the town...
our first sight was yet another religious place (there are a lot of them in kyiv)...vidubytsky monastery...to get to the monastery, we first took the subway, then walked...the guidebook makes it sound as if it's quite difficult to get to the monastery by walking, but i thought we figured it out pretty easily...cross a couple streets, take one turn, then walk a bit...ta da!! this was another time when it was super handy to be able to read street signs, as they were nearly all in ukrainian...
the monastery is at the bottom of a hill, the rest of the hill is the botanical garden...after paying the entrance fee to the gardens, we found a map and figured out how to get to the monastery...only one wrong turn!! despite being mid may, there weren't many flowers blooming in the gardens...i don't know when the flowers all bloom...
as we started descending the hill we caught glimpses of the domes of the monastery, it seems to peek out at you without fully revealing itself to you until you're almost at the gates...bo and i couldn't stop taking photos...i love love loved the blue onion dome with gold stars...
this monastery was established between 1070 and 1077, by vsevolod, who was the son of yaroslav the wise; it was originally a family church...according to wikipedia, the monastery and the surrounding neighborhood were named after an old slavic legend of the pagan god perun, and grand prince vladimir the great of kyiv...it's part of the ukrainian orthodox church, in the kyiv patriarchate, though it did spend some time as part of the greek catholic church (1596-1635)
the monastery is small, we only walked into two buildings...one had beautiful frescoes over all the ceilings and walls...i kept bumping into the walls since i was wandering around looking straight up...as we were in this building, we were the only two visitors...it was soooo quiet...
the other building we entered was a tiny church...due to renovations we weren't able to go very far in, but even if we had, it wasn't large...
we saw several graves/memorials as well on the property...
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