Love and the Lavra - part two.

In March I moved with Ana to Kyiv's Arsenal'na district, between Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) and the right bank of the river Dnieper. It is one of the city's most attractive areas, scattered with lush, sweet-smelling chestnut trees and punctuated by dozens of landmarks.

It is home to the Kievo-Pecherska Lavra (The Kyiv Cave Monastery, completed in 1015), a guardian of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, behind which stands the Rodina - Mat' (Motherland) statue, her thick, silver arms and thick, silver sword thrusting defiantly - and symbolically - at the sky, on top of the Museum of the Great Patriotic War.

Both structures are faithful remains of the destroyed empires of which Kyiv was once a noble and influential part: Prince Volodymyr's Kyivska Rus', from which Russia grew in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and the Soviet Union, which fought the Second World War heroically and to which the museum is dedicated.

Ukraine's modern ambitions also thrive in Arsenal'na: the ten minute walk from the metro station to my flat takes me past restaurants that serve Czech and Vietnamese food, as well as the tiny café Alfredo (with room for two people), an ice rink, a De Beers boutique, and the city's most imaginatively-stocked Sil'po supermarket. Banners across the street proclaim "Love Ukraine!" - quoting the Sosyura poem that motivated Ukrainian nationalists in the 1980's to weaken the Soviet Union enough to make it crumble. In such a neighbourhood the order is very easy to follow.

Our apartment is on the third floor of a clean, echoey building. It is the tallest of three such buildings within a courtyard surrounded by chestnut trees, so that the terrace outside my living room is not so much a balcony as a tree house. The block is almost deserted, save a Georgian family a couple of floors above us and some babushki and dedushki with intelligent faces and smart clothes.

Further along vulytsya Ivana Mazepy - a street named after Ivan Mazepa, a seventeenth century Cossack leader - is Park Slavy ('Glory Park'), where many people gather, either to sip beer and enjoy the view in the evening, or to lay wreaths beside the war memorial at the park's highest point.

On a day off from work I spent an hour in Park Slavy, on a mid-May morning that felt more like an attritional November day. The view from the war memorial has always been one of my favourites in Kyiv: it stretches from the steep grass slope that runs into the Dnieper, to the light blue metro trains that slide over the bridge, to the thin yellow strip of beach at Hydropark, to the new office buildings and housing blocks of Livoberezhna, to scruffy Troeshchina and Darnytsya beyond them, to the hazy outline of Lisova on the horizon - the very easternmost edge of the city.

As I sat on a bench not far from the hotel Salyut, I spotted a wedding party below. It is a Ukrainian tradition for the bride and groom to be photographed in front of their city's landmarks on their wedding day, and the couple were making their way from the Lavra to rest in one of the pagodas by the edge of the river. I couldn't resist the urge to spy on them, and in doing so took this photograph, a memento of another happy memory in Arsenal'na.

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Part of trip: 2009: Newer Stories

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