Kyiv

The Primary Chronicle, compiled at Kyiv in the twelfth century, tells the conversion as a comparison shopping expedition. Vladimir hears out Muslim, Jewish and Latin envoys and sends his own men to observe worship abroad; they report of the Greek liturgy at Constantinople that they did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth, and that where God dwells among men they cannot forget such beauty. Modern historians treat the story as later literary construction over a decision that was political and marital, since Vladimir received an imperial bride, but the chronicle's emphasis on beauty as the argument is itself a fair statement of what Byzantine Christianity offered.

Before that, the chronicle describes idols set up on the hill above the city, Perun with a silver head and gold moustache at their head, and afterwards their destruction, Perun dragged to the Dnieper and beaten with sticks as he floated downstream, while the people of the city were baptised in the river in 988.

What followed was built quickly. The church of the Tithes was endowed with a tenth of the prince's revenue; Yaroslav raised Saint Sophia in the next generation, with mosaics and frescoes still in place; and the Caves monastery was founded by two monks in a hillside above the river, growing into the Kyiv Caves Lavra, whose underground galleries hold the naturally preserved bodies of monks and which has been a place of pilgrimage without interruption since. The lives collected in its Patericon are the first monastic literature of the Slavic world.

The see founded at Kyiv was a metropolitanate of the patriarchate of Constantinople, and its later history is a sequence of disputes about who it belongs to. After the Mongol destruction of the city the metropolitans moved north and eventually to Moscow while keeping the title of Kyiv. The Union of Brest in 1596 took part of the church into communion with Rome, creating the Greek Catholic church that keeps the eastern liturgy under papal authority and that remains a major body in western Ukraine. Peter Mohyla, metropolitan in the seventeenth century, founded the academy at Kyiv that trained clergy for the whole region and reorganised Orthodox theology in response.

In 1686 Constantinople issued a document transferring the Kyiv metropolia to the patriarch of Moscow. Three hundred and thirty two years later Constantinople declared that transfer to have been temporary and revoked it, and in January 2019 granted a tomos of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Moscow broke communion with Constantinople in response, and a substantial church remains in Ukraine under the Moscow Patriarchate, so the country now has two Orthodox jurisdictions with rival claims to the same inheritance.

The Soviet period sits between those events. Churches were closed and clergy imprisoned or killed, and Saint Michael's Golden-Domed monastery in the centre of the city was demolished with explosives in the 1930s. It was rebuilt in the 1990s. The question of which body should hold the Caves Lavra has been contested since 2022.