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Friday, 22 November
kyiv

What St. Volodymyr's Cathedral in Kyiv looked like 130 years ago. Archival photo

Archival photo of St. Volodymyr's Cathedral in Kyiv in the 1890s was shown online. Its construction lasted 20 years until it was finally completed in 1882.

The corresponding photo was published by the Kyiv tour agency "Spraga: it is interesting in Kyiv" on its Facebook page.

The photo shows the Orthodox St. Volodymyr's Cathedral from the side of the modern Vyacheslav Lypynsky Street.

This cathedral used to be the main church of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate. The six-pillared tri-apsidal church, crowned with seven domes, was built in 1862 over a period of 20 years.

Initially, the cathedral was designed by architects Ivan Strom and Pavlo Sparro, but later it was redesigned by architect Alexander Beretti. Three architects took part in the construction of the building: Rudolf Bernhard, Karl Mayevsky, and Vladimir Nikolaev.

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In Soviet times, the cathedral was subordinated to the Kyiv-Halych Metropolis of the Russian Orthodox Church. The authorities of the time also tried to close it in August 1929 "at the numerous requests of working class" and approved the organization of the All-Ukrainian Anti-Religious Museum in its premises.

At the same time, after the formation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate, in 1992 the church became the Patriarchal Cathedral of this denomination. Currently, the relics of St. Macarius (Metropolitan of Kyiv) and the Great Martyr Barbara are kept there.

Earlier, we published interesting archival photos of Trukhaniv Island and Kytayivski Plavni in the 19th and 20th centuries.