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Published: July 19th 2012
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Today is our last day in Kiev. We packed our bags and left them at the hostel, and after some breakfast and blogging at the cheap café nearby we set out for Caves monastery. The monastery is Ukraines most important religious site, and consists of two parts, the wall surrounded Upper Lavra and the Lower Lavra where the most important religious places are.
After a few kilometers of walking we arrived to the Caves monastery. There was a 5€ per person fee to get into the Upper Lavra for, for cameras it was more expensive so we left them in their bags. The Upper Lavra was nice, but not that special. There was one impressive church and some smaller museums (without any English texts), but the two main things we were interested in, the museum of microminituration and the bell tower with its panoramic view were both closed.
There was no entrance fee to the Lower Lavra, not even for cameras. This part of the area was however much more religious, and Johanna had to dress up in a borrowed skirt and cover her hair in order to be decent. My shorts luckily extended over my knees so I
got in without renting a skirt. 😊 The main attractions of the Lower Lavra are caves the monks have dug in the 11th century, and where they have also been burried (and due to the coolness and dryness of the caves, mummified). The mummies are very holy, and people are traveling from far to kiss the hands and feets sticking out of the cloth. Nowadays there is luckily glass coffins around the mummies to protect them from too eager kissing, but several of the people we saw down in the tunnels were kissing each and every of the coffins they passed...
The first tunnel we went down into was quite short, and we were both feeling "Was this everything?" when coming up from the tunnels. We also hadn't understood that it is policy that everybody (also the not orthodox) should buy a candle before going down in the caves. The other cave was much more extensive, and this time we had also bought candles before entering. The candles improved the athmosphere alot, and the longer tunnels also made the caves much more impressive, so we were much more taken by the second set of tunnels, definitely worth seeing!
Quite near the monastery there were also another sight, the museum of the great patriotic war telling all about what the atrocities the Nazis did during WWII. The museum had just closed when we got there, but we continued to the monument over the fallen solders, a huge iron lady standing over a park containing communist monuments of charging solders. At this point we were getting hungry, so we took a borsch at a nearby restaurant. As it was getting late afternoon we decided to go back to the city center to eat and get ready for the train trip.
When getting back to the city center we were hungry again, so we ate a second dinner at the same restaurant as yesterday. Then we headed to Billa to stock up on travel snacks, went to our hostel to get our bags and headed to the railway station. We shared cabin in the train with two teenagers, this time we got the lower beds, so we should be able to sleep better than the earlier train trips.
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