Chernihiv

No one knows the exact date of its foundation because it is a very old place. The researchers say it was founded between the VII and the IX century.

Also, the city was heavily damaged during WWII, that is why most of the buildings were constructed not earlier than in the 50's. The oldest part of the city remained in the main park. There are only few old buildings, some of them were built in XII century but since then they were completely reconstructed several times.

Old city

The old building of the College (XVII century)

The reconstruction of XII century church

The emperor Peter I installed these cannons to glorify the victory in the war with Sweden.

St. Catherine Church (XVIII century) is the first thing you see entering Chernihiv from the Kyiv direction

Probably the most famous place of Chernihiv. It is Piatnytska church built in XIII century

A Bit of Streets and Squares

That is the main theatre and concert hall

The main cinema

It says "The building of Radio"

The train station which was constructed by the Germans as reparation after WWII. My school history teacher once said they made swastika pattern on the floor of the main hall which was only visible from the top. Once it was noticed the floor was changed completely.

It stands close to road to Kiev and I always look at it when my bus passes by. It grew insanely huge during the last 10 years.

There are a lot of wooden one-story houses built in the 50's. They are very typical for northern Ukrainian and Russian settlements. This architecture has been in use since XIX century.

The reconstruction of the living house

Now there's a restaurant

And a lot of them are abandoned.

You noticed that cyrillic letters were similar to greek. The first cyrillic alphabet was created by the monks on the greek alphabet basis adapted to the old slavic language phonetics. And they used it to write the entire Bible in the old slavic language instead of Latin or Greek. For the many more centuries forward the written slavic language has been existing only for the church purposes. And it has changed little since those ancient times, while the spoken language developed into a family of all the modern slavic languages. The church still uses the old language.

Thanks to the calligraphy lessons I can read and understand it but I cannot speak it. The monks used the two types of script. The one is for headings and the other one is for body text. The heading always should be written in one line no matter the words number or length. That is why the letters could be connected to each other like a knitting.

The left page says about a priest named Afanasy and the right page says about Nikolay the prince of Chernigov (the book was printed in XIX century, not so old but it uses church slavic language)

You see, it contains greek letters. The text explains what is holy trinity.

Not as cool as a runic stone but anyways! It just says that in 1740 some rich noble invested his money in the church construction and it gives details about the church. This one is quite hard for me to read.

This is the image of saint Nicholas who is the slavic version of Santa Clause. And also he is the protector of anyone whose name is Nicholas. 😉

The typical interior of the Ukrainian village house from the museum of arts. I remember the house of my grandfather in Chernihiv region built in the beginning of the XX century and it actually had the similar interior.

My mother said she remembered how her grandmother used such iron with live coals inside