Kiev Part 1 Sevastopol, Crimea July 15, 2004 Hi Folks, We just had an interesting night last night, as a storm brought big swells into the Yacht club, so big that we had to relocate deeper into Sevastopol Harbour to the end of South Bay, a long deep inlet in the Sevastopol harbour where many navy ships are moored. As we motored over to it, the swells flooding into the harbour were at least 3 metres high. We went alongside a power boat from the club which preceded us out and had rafted alongside a small ship. It was far quieter in there. Because of the storm, we put off our trip to Balaclava. We are quite interested in the history of Sevastopol and the Crimea. Sevastopol has been built three times in the past 250 years. The first was by Catherine the Great of Russia to establish the Russian Navy Black Sea fleet in 1783, the second after the siege of Sevastopol destroyed most of the city in the Crimean War (known as the Eastern War in Russia) after the Treaty of Paris in 1856, and the third after WW II after being destroyed by the German siege in 1941-42 and liberated by heavy attacks of Russian forces in 1944. This is a beautiful city, a city of monuments. Needless to say when we get over to Balaclava, we will have to go to the area north of the town to the Valley of Death where the Charge of the Light Brigade into the Russian guns took place during the Crimean War. This place is just reeking of history. More about it in my logs of the area. All the best, Aubrey PS July 19/04 – Hi again, No luck in sending until today, my birthday. We have dressed ship overall for it as a rehearsal for July 25th the Russian Black Sea Fleet Review. We spent the last two days in Balaclava and went t the site of the Charge of the Light Brigade. More about it in my relevant log. **************************************************************************** Log #32s Kiev Part 1 Kiev is as beautiful as Odessa but on a larger scale. Yachts can actually motor all the way up the Dnieper (Dnipro) River to Kiev, but any with masts above 13 metres would have to lower their masts for the few fixed bridges that do not open. I don’t know what the bureaucracy would be like, but for us it was not worthwhile. The train was fine. We had talked with Southern Flight, a Brit motor yacht we met at Atakoy Marina in Istanbul, who had done the river trip but in company with another Ukrainian yacht. It took them seven days each way for a total of 1071 nautical miles from Odessa to Kiev and back to Odessa. We have encountered too much inefficient bureaucracy here in the Ukraine to bother with outlying ports or inland cities. We did it in the comfort of an overnight train with wine and hors d’oeuvres in our first class private compartment instead. Kyiv (in Ukrainian) or Kiev (in Russian) is the capital of Ukraine and considered the mother city for all Eastern Slavic peoples. It is the state from which neighbouring Russia and Belarus were descended (Kyvian Rus) according to our Lonely Planet Guide. Thus it predates Moscow as the origin of Russia! No wonder that when the USSR broke up, the separation of the Ukraine was a serious defection from the Rodina. We arrived at 0730, and by 1030 were settled into our small apartment and ready to start our touring, as Judy had a four day itinerary of museums lined up for us. We started walking, and walking, and walking, following a city map we had bought. However the maps don’t show the hills and are not necessarily to scale. This first day we walked for at least five hours. After walking to the Golden Gate museum to find it closed, we walked to four other museums. From the Golden Gate we hiked past St Sophia Cathedral across the main plaza to the monument of the Cossack leader Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky. He led a rebellion against Polish control in 1648, only to submit to a counter alliance and subsequent domination with Russia in 1654; but he still embodies the Cossack spirit and the spirit for independence of Ukraine. Past St. Michael’s Cathedral on the side opposite St Sophia, we were trying to get over to Podil to a couple of museums in that area. However, unknown to us, it was at the base of the escarpment along the Dnipro River. Our map showed a circuitous route leading to a funicular. We headed for the funicular, only to find out it was closed. Spying a path beneath it we tried that, hoping to find a shorter way down. No luck! The path wound around and over to another street. However this was the charming Andryivsky uzviz (Andrew’s Descent) which wound down the escarpment to the district of Podil. We stopped at a small museum called Museum of One (Andryivsky) Street, a cultural private museum showing the lives and professions of different households on this street from the 1800’s. After a nice economical cafeteria lunch (point and say Da), we went to the sobering Chornobyl Museum. I haven’t been to any museum so moving since Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, or the Hiroshima Museum. It is housed in an old fire station, an appropriate location as many (hundreds) of firemen were the initial rescuers and workers on the scene of this nuclear tragedy in April, 1986, and died of radiation poisoning. The parallel to the sacrifice of the firemen in the 9/11 Trade Tower bombing in New York is unmistakable. Entrance to the main exhibit hall was framed by the roadside signs for the dozens of towns that were downwind of the explosion; the inhabitants were affected by the spreading radiation, the towns abandoned, and are still unpopulated, at least those within a 30 km radius. Kiev was only 100 kilometres south. There were hundreds of photographs of the firemen, interspersed throughout the displays of the rescue, decontamination and clean up. The radiation suits they used would not have stopped much of the more intense radiation as the suits were more for chemical and fire retardant purposes. The front facial photographs, combined with the family photographs of the firemen victims were very moving. However there were two large circular displays of the hundreds of children killed by radiation poisoning or who were born with birth defects due to the radiation. This museum shows the human dimension of the catastrophe. There were over 4,365 killed and 167, 653 who suffered from often fatal diseases following the explosion and clean up. As my Lonely Planet Guide says, an estimated 4.9 million people in northern Ukraine, southern Belarus and the southwestern corner of Russia were affected to some degree. The reactor was encased in a concrete sarcophagus which is now supposedly crumbling and is a source of concern. On we walked in this Podil district to the Museum Hetmanstva, dedicated to the Hetmans, Cossack chieftains of the Ukraine, especially Hetman Mazepa, the last Cossack leader to rise up against the Russians, wiped out by Russian troops in the battle of Poltava in 1709.We did not relish climbing back up Andryivsky uzviz, and so took a taxi which was able to go only half way up due to a street closure. We walked the rest of the way up to the Ukraine History Museum, a dramatic classical building with good displays, but all in Russian and Ukrainian only. While there I faded completely around 1700 and we caught a taxi back to our apartment. We rested for a couple of hours before going out for supper at Uncle Sam’s American restaurant, where we had very good steaks, but at North American prices. Then we walked over town to find an internet café where we sent some E-mail before catching another taxi back. A very busy first day in Kiev! Valentina, our babushka landlady, came over next morning talking away and trying to help us. She then took us out to catch a bus, and indicated we should not pay. We were not asked by the conductor who went up and down accepting the 50 kopec (10 cents) fares. Perhaps it was because we were senior citizens? We could not understand why from her. She kept talking away in Russian (Ukrainian?), pointing out and naming various buildings. We actually did not want her along as we prefer to explore on our own, but she kept directing us to different stops and buses. At least we were learning how to use the bus system. We initially thought she was just going to show us the buses to catch to the Caves Monastery, but she was with us for the day. We seemed to be wandering aimlessly not knowing where she was taking us, but finally wound up at the Defence of the Motherland Monument, a 72 metre high metallic statue of Rodina (Motherland) brandishing a sword and shield, dominating the park and ridgeline overlooking the Dnieper River. We went first through a military museum and outdoor military display park. The museum seemed to be a regimental account of Soviet military life in their different fields of operation such as Afghanistan, Cuba, Angola, Chechnya, and other locations in Africa and Asia. Having grown up through the Cold War and lived on a Canadian NATO base in West Germany for three years, it seemed strange seeing things from the Soviet side. The outdoor park had a good display of Soviet military equipment including dozens of tanks of varying sizes and vintages, armoured personnel carriers, mobile howitzers, mortars, a Hinde attack helicopter, several versions of their MIG fighter jets, a shallow-draft river gunboat, a military supply aircraft similar to the old Dakotas, mobile missile launchers, and an ICBM on its launch pad. Lots of toys! The main museum, The Ukrainian Museum of the Great Patriotic War, is beneath the Rodina statue. It is an extremely good, modern, well displayed account of Ukraine’s experience in WW II. It outlined the progress of the war, the German lines of conquest and the Soviet lines of liberation, battles for various cities. The suffering and the struggle for survival were graphically displayed. There were some film clips of the bombing and firestorms in the cities. It did not glorify war or propagandize the Soviet military, but was a good, human account of what individual soldiers and families experienced. One of the most moving of the many pictures was of a group of mothers saddened at the loss of husbands and sons. We were able to make sense of the displays, although there were no English explanations, and our landlady was not able to translate, but she was moved by some of the displays, meaningful to her. The large open plaza in front has a couple of tanks facing each other, but they are brightly painted with flowers and peace symbols. They contrast with the dark, brooding, dedicated, triumphal, bas-relief statuary of soldiers, partisans, workers, and families around the walkway from the plaza, an extremely good representation of the genre of Socialist Realism statuary. From the park we finally walked the short distance to the Caves Monastery, our original goal for the day. This monastery, which dates back to 1051, has an array of gold domed churches and underground labyrinths lined with dozens of mummified monks, and other monastic buildings now museums. The entire monastery was converted to museums by the Communist regime in 1926, but some of the caves and their churches were restored to the Orthodox Church in 1988 and this section is occupied by about 70 monks at present. The most impressive part for us was the Historical Treasures Museum, a fantastic display of treasures housed in several vault-like rooms with maximum security. The major part of the museum is the fabulous hoard of gold jewellery from a couple of Scythian burial mounds dating back to the 4th century BC. The gold pectoral (a shield-like necklace) is breathtaking in its beauty of fine filigree work and superbly detailed animals embossed in the breastplate. Gold rings, bracelets, belts, tiaras, pins, and other jewellery were magnificently worked to the finest detail, amazing workmanship especially considering they are over 2500 years old. Other treasures of this museum include gold, silver, pewter and crystal bowls, crosses, chalices, and icons richly ornamented and bejeweled by Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and Lithuanian craftsmen throughout the centuries. Back up the escarpment from the caves we slowly wended our way, with Valentina, to catch the bus back to our apartment. Thus ended our second day in Kiev. Next log