Declutter…Day 117

The question is: How great would YOU feel if you removed one unused item from your home each day for a whole year? The declutter challenge.
Toss, Donate, or Sell one item from your home every single day for one year.
No rules.
No advice.

Day 117
Photos. If I don’t know the people, I don’t need the picture. Right? Still have several more albums to go through that we nabbed from Jim’s mom’s estate…some priceless family shots!
What did you dump today?

Touring Kyiv — Podil (1)

Jim and I took a self-guided walking tour of our section of Kyiv on Saturday. I thought some of you might be interested in selected famous or historical sites here and so I will post a bit of this tour (plus subsequent tours of sections of Kyiv) periodically on my blog. (Reminder: clicking on the photos will give you an enlarged version.)

We began our adventure leaving our flat and making a zig-zag approach to the Dnipro River which is only two blocks away. Along the way we passed the museum of the hetmans:

Interesting facts from one of our guidebooks:
It was built at the beginning of the 18th century, and was later reconstructed more than once. The museum collection contains about 2000 exhibits. And because the building stands obliquely to the lines of the streets it survived the fire of 1811.

I have not found any explanations of the statues in the yard. I do plan to venture inside with my Ukrainian tutor as part of a language lesson.

We continued towards the river and stopped at a 2-story old building on the riverbank. It was a bursa — a dormitory for non-Kyivan students of the Kyiv Mogila academy (more about the academy in a future post). I find it interesting that memorial plaques are placed on buildings where famous people lived or studied or were born. This building featured a plate in memory of Semen Gulak-Artemovsky who studied in the seminary in 1824-1830. Per a guidebook:

“He was a poor student, but he had a beautiful baritone voice. When the composer Mikhail Glinka, who served as the bandmaster of the court choir, was selecting talented performers from Ukraine he took Semen away to Petersburg. The Kyiv seminarist became a famous singer and composer, the author of the immortal opera ‘Zaporozhets on the Danube.'”

Behind that building is one of many churches located in the Podil region. This particular one is the Church of Nikolay Naberezhny to differentiate it from other churches named after Saint Nikolay. (Naberezhny designates that it is on the riverbank.)

“This well-shaped stone church with its single dome was built in 1772-1775. This is a late work in the Ukrainian Baroque style and is close to Classicism. The dome was rebuilt later in Byzantine style.”

Nearby there is a granite memorial cross.

The inscription reads “To those who sacrificed their life for Ukraine.”