In seven years of independence Kyiv has seen many new memorials built. If they are not destroyed by the next historical earthquake, as often happens with the East Slavs, these monuments will give succeeding generations much interesting testimony, for behind almost all of them there was bitter political and ecclesiastical struggle. Many tiny replicas of the Biblical Tower of Babel are also presented among them symbolizing human pomposity and vanity. Let us look more closely at some of them.
Next to the former Golden Gates, now encased in a memorial to the previous epoch, a sculpture of Prince Yaroslav has been erected. The poor Grand Prince looks unnatural, affected, and anatomically deformed. Perhaps only singers from a provincial opera can contort themselves in such a way. The bronze figure looks likes almost monstrous and much too big for the small square. It might look better from a distance, a great one. It was not enough to have the Prince exposed nearby Golden Gates. A replica of the head of this masterpiece also decorates artistic Andriyivsky uzviz. What artistic council sanctioned building and placing this second monument? In any case, it is quite obvious that some artistic gurus were guided by considerations very far from aesthetics and art. They simply wanted to kill two birds with one stone. The first reason to fulfill patriotic obligations towards this great ancestor, for Moscow also claims the Grand Prince. Recall his monument in the city of Yaroslavl. The second reason was to remind everybody of the outstanding Kyiv sculptor, Ivan Kavaleridze. And they did.
The bell tower of the Mikhailivsky monastery also looks like as a dubious attainment. As for me, two bell towers of the same style (eighteenth century Ukrainian baroque) is a bit much. The main thing is that the bell tower became today a mirror and symbol of the wistful confrontation, which now deforms Ukrainian church life. Who knows when and how we could have seen this bell tower, if there were no competition. Moreover, the church itself bears the signs of the haste with which it was built. There is something of a stage set in it, something artificial. Unwillingly you expect that something is about to happen to the bell tower right now. (Incidentally, the walls of the Bohorodytsa Pyrohoshchi Church have already come off.)
In addition to churches, bell towers, and monuments, our capital is widely decorated with banks. (I wish we had as much money as banks.) The banks cannot be reproached for bad construction or lack of taste. Look, for example, at the Kyiv Branch of the National Bank of Ukraine in Kontraktova Ploshcha. It has the best bell tower in Kyiv, to say nothing about the complete harmony of its construction, and you can be certain that its inner yard is even more imposing than the facade. I had the good fortune to be inside the bank. What taste, how professionally presented and stressed are the remnants of its historical decor! The best materials were used: marble, precious woods, crystal, and artistic parquet. Involuntarily I recalled the peeling walls of colleges, schools, scientific institutions, and hospitals. Then I thought, "Let them build: it's better than their transferring the money abroad." However, a time — a normal time — will come when such a quantity of cathedrals to the golden calf will become unnecessary. Still, the beautiful, first-class buildings will adorn the city and belong to it.
Perhaps the most meaningful sign of our time is a monument, which appeared three years ago near the bell tower of St. Sofia. It is the grave of Patriarch Volodymyr near which you always feel a kind of presence like in a magical field. For dark passions are concentrated around this grave which are today rending our society asunder. Enmity rages between Christians, between the East and the West of Ukraine, between parties, between generations, between society and the authorities. And this is why it seems that the Ukrainian Patriarch not only will but should lie under the feet of passers-by until the enmity comes to an end, until Ukrainian citizens of all churches, confessions, parties, and nationalities come to the grave of the Patriarch in a united procession.






