KIEF.
Kief, the oldest of Russian sees, is not in Russia Proper, and many
historians treat it as a Polish town. The people are Ruthenians, and
for hundreds of years the city belonged to the Polish crown. The plain
in front of it is the Ukraine steppe; the land of hetman and
zaporogue; of stirring legends and riotous song. The manners are
Polish and the people Poles. Yet here lies the cradle of that church
which has shaped into its own likeness every quality of Russian
political and domestic life.
The city consists of three parts, of three several towns--Podol, Vich
Gorod, Pechersk; a business town, an imperial town, and a sacred town.
All these quarters are crowded with offices, shops, and convents; yet
Podol is the merchant quarter, Vich Gorod the Government quarter, and
Pechersk the pilgrim quarter. These towns overhang the Dnieper, on a
range of broken cliffs; contain about seventy thousand souls; and
hold, in two several places of interment, all that was mortal of the
Pagan duke who became her foremost saint.
Kief is a city of legends and events; the preaching of St. Andrew, the
piety of St. Olga, the conversion of St. Vladimir; the Mongolian
assault, the Polish conquest, the recovery by Peter the Great. The
provinces round Kief resemble it, and rival it, in historic fame.
Country of Mazeppa and Gonta, the Ukraine teems with story; tales of
the raid, the flight, the night attack, the violated town. Every
village has its legend, every town its epic, of love and war. The land
is aglow with personal life. Yon chapel marks the spot where a grand
duke was killed; this mound is the tomb of a Tartar horde; that field
is the site of a battle with the Poles. The men are brighter and
livelier, the houses are better built, and the fields are better
trimmed than in the North and East. The music is quicker, the brandy
is stronger, the love is warmer, the hatred is keener, than you find
elsewhere. These provinces are Gogol's country, and the scenery is
that of his most popular tales.
Like all the southern cities, Kief fell into the power of Batu Khan,
the Mongol chief, and groaned for ages under the yoke of Asiatic begs.
These begs were idol-worshippers, and under their savage and
idolatrous rule the children of Vladimir had to pass through heavy
trials; but Kief can boast that in the worst of times she kept in her
humble churches and her underground caves the sacred embers of her
faith alive.
Below the tops of two high hills, three miles from that Vich Gorod in
which Vladimir built his harem, and raised the statue of his Pagan
god, some Christian hermits, Anton, Feodosie, and their fellows, dug
for themselves in the loose red rock a series of corridors and caves,
in which they lived and died, examples of lowly virtue and the
Christian life. The Russian word for cave is pechera, and the site of
these caves was called Pechersk. Above the cells in which these
hermits dwelt, two convents gradually arose, and took the names of
Anton and Feodosie, now become the patron saints of Kief, and the
reputed fathers of all men living in Russia a monastic life.
A green dip between the old town, now trimmed and planted, parts the
first convent--that of Anton--from the city; a second dip divides the
convent of Feodosie, from that of his fellow-saint. These convents,
nobly planned and strongly built, take rank among the finest piles in
Eastern Europe. Domes and pinnacles of gold surmount each edifice; and
every wall is pictured with legends from the lives of saints. The
ground is holy. More than a hundred hermits lie in the catacombs, and
crowds of holy men lie mouldering in every niche of the solid wall.
Mouldering! I crave their pardons. Holy men never rust and rot. For
purity of the flesh in death is evidence of purity of the flesh in
life; and saints are just as incorruptible of body as of soul. In
Anton's Convent you are shown the skull of St. Vladimir; that is to
say, a velvet pall in which his skull is said to be wrapped and
swathed. You are told that the flesh is pure, the skin uncracked, the
odor sweet. A line of dead bodies fills the underground passages and
lanes--each body in a niche of the rock; and all these martyrs of the
faith are said to be, like Vladimir, also fresh and sweet.
A stranger can not say whether this tale of the incorruptibility of
early saints and monks is true or not; since nothing can be seen of
the outward eye except a coffin, a velvet pall, and an inscription
newly painted in the Slavonic tongue. A great deal turns on the amount
of faith in which you seek for proof. For monks are men, and a critic
can hardly press them with his doubts. Suppose you try to persuade
your guides to lift the pall from St. Anton's face. Your own opinion
is that even though human frames might resist the dissolving action of
an atmosphere like that of Sicily and Egypt, nothing less than a
miracle could have preserved intact the bodies of saints who died a
thousand years ago, in a cold, damp climate like that of Kief. You
wish to put your science to the test of fact. You wish in vain. The
monk will answer for the miracle, but no one answers for the monk.
Fifty thousand pilgrims, chiefly Ruthenians from the populous
provinces of Podolia, Kief, and Volhynia, come in summer to these
shrines.
When Kief recovered her freedom from the Tartar begs, she found
herself by the chance of war a city of Polonia, not of Moscovy--a
member of the Western, not of the Eastern section of her race. Kief
had never been Russ, as Moscow was Russ; a rude, barbaric town, with
crowds of traders and rustics, ruled by a Tartarized court; and now
that her lot was cast with the more liberal and enlightened West, she
grew into a yet more Oriental Prague. For many reigns she lay open to
the arts of Germany and France; and when she returned to Russia, in
the times of Peter the Great, she was not alone the noblest jewel in
his crown, but a point of union, nowhere else to be found, for all the
Slavonic nations in the world.
As an inland city Kief has the finest site in Russia. Standing on a
range of bluffs, she overlooks a splendid length of steppe, a broad
and navigable stream. She is the port and capital of the Ukraine; and
the Malo-Russians, whether settled on the Don, the Ural, or the
Dniester, look to her for orders of the day. She touches Poland with
her right hand, Russia with her left; she flanks Galicia and Moldavia,
and keeps her front towards the Bulgarians, the Montenegrins, and the
Serbs. In her races and religions she is much in little; an epitome of
all the Slavonic tribes. One-third of her population is Moscovite,
one-third Russine, and one-third Polack; while in faith she is
Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and United Greek. If any city in Europe
offers itself to Panslavonic dreamers as their natural capital, it is
Kief.