Chernihiv occupies a unique place in the history and culture of Eastern Europe. It is only here that you can still see a series of pre-Mongol- invasion monuments that represent all the consecutive stages of the almost 200-year-long history of Kyivan Rus architecture.
This wonderful string of construction art masterpieces begins with the Spaso-Preobrazhensky (Salvation and Transfiguration) Cathedral erected by Prince Mstyslav Volodymyrovych in 1030 as the chief building in the capital of the powerful Chernihiv Principality that stretched as far as the Oka and Don Rivers and the Sea of Azov. Located in what once was a fortified area, the Salvation Cathedral served for many centuries as the principality’s main sanctuary with miraculous icons and the relics of saints and princes. The cathedral’s layout is unparalleled among Kyivan Rus churches. The structure is the combination of a Byzantine Greek cross structure and some elements of a Roman basilica: there are four pairs of columns inside the temple, one of them being in the altar area. It is quite possible that Mstyslav invited architects from the Tmutarakan Principality, where he had occupied the throne until his triumphal return to Chernihiv. The Tmutarakan masters knew how to build structures similar to those in many parts of Asia Minor and the Transcaucus.
As high as thirty meters in the dome’s apex, the cathedral was, with no exaggeration, an extraordinary, fantastic, and incredible structure in those times. Stone was not so widely used for construction purposes in Rus’ as in Western Europe. While the common people eked out an existence in small semi-dugouts, the temple not only towered over the whole city but was also in plain view from the city’s external ramparts.
The cathedral was made of natural sandstone and plinths (large bricks). This combination of building materials came to be known as mixed technique (opus mixtum). Crushed baked clay was added to lime-based mortar, which tinted the stonework pink. Facades were ornamented with brick-made meanders, ribbons and crosses. At first, the cathedral’s walls were covered with stucco and looked very exquisite and fine thanks to this ornamentation (now the walls are covered with moisture proof stucco). In the course of centuries, the temple was rebuilt several times; in the late eighteenth century it was crowned with two conical spires, which made the cathedral look like a Polish Catholic church.
Inside, the walls were adorned with frescoes which have unfortunately failed to survive. What has remained of the original interior ornaments is only the parapet slates that adorn the building’s second tier. Also noteworthy is the temple’s baroque- cum-classicism iconostasis, with gilded fragments, made from a hundred lime logs in the late eighteenth century. This piece of art has remained almost undamaged and, since there are very few old iconostases in Ukrainian churches, is of a great artistic and cultural value.
A fundamentally different engineering approach — also unique for Kyivan Rus’ structures — was resorted to in the construction of St. Elijah’s Church next to the Boldyna Hill in the first quarter of the twelfth century. Unlike the Salvation and Transfiguration Cathedral, in which columns were used to support the building’s upper tiers, St. Elijah’s Church was at that time the Dnipro area’s only temple without pillars. The drum of the church’s only dome rested directly on triangular vaults that uniformly distributed its load onto the walls. This design was necessitated by the temple’s small interior. This is why the iconostasis made in 1774 in the late baroque or rococo style has a jagged layout: this made it possible to place as many icons as possible in it.
Next to the Salvation Cathedral stands the Cathedral of Saints Borys and Hlib built in 1120 by Prince Davyd as a princely sepulcher. Borys and Hlib, sons of Grand Prince Volodymyr of Kyiv, were assassinated in an internecine conflict on the order of their brother Sviatopolk the Accursed. They were later canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church as martyrs who died for the country’s unity. The cathedral is a typical cross-and-dome temple. This means that the dome and the drum that supports it distribute the load onto the four columns inside the building. It is these four columns that impart a characteristic cross-like shape to the temple’s interior.
The structure is 25 meters high (from the floor to the cupola’s apex) in its central nave. The temple was built completely from Ancient Rusian plinths, with no natural stone used. The plinths were made of white china clay; in contrast to the Salvation and Transfiguration Cathedral, that of Saints Borys and Hlib features quite up-to-date range masonry, whereby one range of plinths was laid after the other. As principalities waged continuous internecine wars at the time and churches were often the last hope and fortress of town residents, the temple’s walls were one-and-a-half to two meters thick. Embrasures were also made for defensive purposes. The cathedral features an almost Roman-style layout — it strikes one with monumentality, calm, and might.
The cathedral was often rebuilt and badly damaged by World War II bombings. Today, this it is the most typical place of worship representing the medieval Chernihiv architectural style. It is one of the few structures restored to its almost original shape.
The most interesting and important elements of the building are the carved capitals that crown its outer semi-columns. With carved stone having been used in only three Rusian principalities, the Chernihiv bas- reliefs are the best and of the greatest artistic value. The capitals depict fantastic animals and plants braided into intricate ornamentation. These images are reminiscent of the pagan period. This is the so-called animal style in art, often resorted to in making jewelry for the Scythian kings. One can see examples of the animal style in the ornamentation of twelfth-century buildings in today’s Southern France.
In 1701, earth-moving workers found a silver pagan idol near the cathedral. The historical value of this find is difficult to overestimate. For only one stone-made pagan idol has reached us: it was found in 1848 on the banks of the Zbruch River in Western Ukraine. Yet, there are ample grounds to believe that the Zbruch idol, now kept in a Krakow museum, is a fake. To our great regret, the Chernihiv idol is gone forever: its silver was used to make the kings’ gate for the Cathedral of Saints Borys and Hlib (the iconostasis was lost).
The fifty kilogram gate was cast in Augsburg, Germany, according to a sketch by an unknown Chernihiv-based artist. The central part of each board pictures, accordingly, St. Borys and St. Hlib, with the four evangelists above and below. The lowest part shows the Prophet Isaiah and King David, the upper part pictures the Holy Virgin and Archangel Gabriel, with the blessing Christ topping the view, while images of the ten kings of Judah are placed from top to bottom down the central axis. The gate’s lowest part is adorned with Ukrainian Hetman Ivan Mazepa’s coat-of-arms. The kings’ gate is an invaluable masterpiece of art that has reached us almost undamaged.
The cathedral’s interior stores Chernihiv’s most interesting monument, symbol, and talisman — a white-stone relief that once adorned the temple’s western portal. It depicts the Beast of Chernihiv, a fantastic creature with a dog’s head, a pair of paws, bird’s wings and a vine-encircled scaly torso ending in a snake-like tail.
What logically comes at the end of this series of Ancient Rusian architectural monuments is the Church of Paraskeva Friday, the most valuable gem built at the turn of the thirteenth century near the city’s marketplace and named for a patron saint of merchants.
This church’s story is unusual. Before being seriously damaged in a World War II air raid, it was dressed in “baroque clothes” and looked, at first glance, like a seventeenth-century structure. As soon as the Nazis were driven away, experts began to thoroughly study if the original church could be restored at least to some extent. The research resulted in a sensation: archeologists found a temple which embodied the highest achievements of pre-Mongol Rusian architecture. It was considered for a long time that the architecture of Rus’ proper began to develop only in the fourteenth century after the Tatar- Mongol invasion, when our architects abandoned Byzantine traditions. Yet, examination of the Friday Church, a contemporary of The Lay of the Host of Ihor, showed that the nation’s architecture had been in the making a century and a half earlier. The church was thus restored to its original shape.
The Byzantine style, which dominated in Rus’s first houses of worship, was based on a rich and striking interior aimed at making people believe in the advantages of Christian faith. The situation changed later: believers went to church to be nearer to and communicate with God. Temples assumed more human proportions. Simultaneously, architects began to pay much more attention to the exterior. In Europe, this tendency meant transition from the Romanesque style to the Gothic. Churches ceased to resemble fortress towers. Instead, they soared aloft, with their height being almost twice as large as their horizontal measurements. The outer walls lost their Romanesque monumentality and, owing to fair proportions, began to look joyful, refined and lofty.
The Church of Paraskeva Friday is a towering Greek cross temple. In spite of a relatively small size of 12 x 10.5 meters, or 15 x 10.5 meters with the apse included, it is 27 meters high from the floor to the dome apex. It is thus two meters taller than the Cathedral of Saints Borys and Hlib, its predecessor. The church’s three tiers only intensify its upward-looking image.
The architectural features that were first revealed in the Friday Church were further developed in Russian, Ukrainian, and Romanian church construction. The Friday Church was erected much earlier than all the sixteenth-century Moscow hip- roof churches. The very similar Ascension Church, Muscovy’s first hip-roof stone building, was built in 1532 in the village of Kolomenskoye. In Russian architecture, zakomara turned into kokoshnik. Zakomara is a structural architectural element, a vault’s outer arch, while kokoshnik is a purely decorative element, a flat plate shaped like a flower petal or a characteristic Russian woman’s headgear of the same name.
Another interesting and important detail. The construction of this temple made the most of the brick’s decorative potential, with the Friday Church’s ornamental brickwork being an early example of the decoration style further developed in Novgorod and Pskov.
Unfortunately, the Tatar-Mongol invasion cut short the interesting development of Old Rusian architecture. In 1239, Chernihiv was stormed and seized by Mentu Khan, a cousin of Batu. The city was so plundered and devastated that it could only restore its early-thirteenth-century size four centuries later.
The political, cultural, and economic revival of what once was a princely city, as well as of Left Bank Ukraine in general, only began in the epoch of hetmans, when Ukraine enjoyed limited autonomy under the Russian Empire. Yet, neither Chernihiv, nor the Sivershchyna region of which it is the historic center, was ever destined to restore their erstwhile glory.
