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St. Andrew

This church is perhaps the most mysterious in all of Kyiv. Many excursions start from this church
It’s hard to imagine Kyiv today without St. Andrew’s Church.

St. Andrew's Church was erected in the middle of the 17th century specifically by order of the “Empress” Elizabeth, daughter of Peter I. The construction of the temple, and the entire history of its origin, is quite unusual and shrouded in legends. The Tale of Bygone Years reports that the Apostle Andrew, preaching in Korsun, decided to go to Rome, and along the way he ended up in Kyiv. Arriving at the mountain on which the church now stands, the apostle proclaimed the words known to everyone: “Do you see these mountains? The grace of God will shine on these mountains.”
The current temple was founded in 1744 and was built according to the design of the court architect Francesco Bartolomeo de Rastrelli. While digging a pit for the foundation, it turned out that it was not without reason that the people of Kiev constantly erected new churches in the same place - the mountain was saturated with groundwater, and over time all the buildings simply fell, washed away by underground streams. F.B. Rastrelli drew up his project without taking into account the landslide nature of the soil. And the direct builder of the temple, Ivan Fedorovich Michurin, was forced to quickly make amendments and look for a way out of the current situation. To do this, the foundations were deepened by more than forty meters, almost to the height of the temple itself. On this basis, a two-story stylobate was erected - the clergy's dwelling, the internal partitions of which, reaching a thickness of several meters, support the walls of the temple.