This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Ukraine gathers two cities that carry Orthodox Christianity from its founding baptism to a contested modern jurisdiction, and from a cave monastery to a wonderworking icon.
Kyiv is where the Rus were baptized under Vladimir in 988, the event from which the Orthodox churches of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus all trace their Christianization. The Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, the monastery of the caves founded in the eleventh century, holds the remains of monks in its underground galleries and has been a destination of pilgrimage ever since. The city's Orthodox jurisdictions have been contested since 2018, when the Ecumenical Patriarch granted autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, a decision Moscow rejects.
Pochayiv, in western Ukraine's Ternopil region, grew up around the Dormition Pochayiv Lavra, ranked as the second most significant monastery in Ukrainian Orthodox Christianity after the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra. Tradition holds that monks settled on the hill after the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, where a vision of the Mother of God left an impression resembling a footprint in the rock, from which a spring is said to flow; the footprint and its chapel remain a focus of pilgrimage, alongside an icon of the Mother of God of Pochayiv venerated as wonderworking. The monastery passed under Greek Catholic Basilian control from 1720, reverted to Orthodoxy in 1831, was raised to Lavra rank in 1833, and remained one of the few Ukrainian monasteries never fully closed through the Soviet period.