Religion and sex in Kyiv

Kyiv has some of the most beautiful and least well known churches in the world. At least, they are not well known to Westerners. Orthodox monks lived in the caves under the Lavra monastery from the sixth century onwards, eventually bringing Christianity to Russia. Now the Lavra monastery is a UNESCO world heritage site. It's the only place in Kyiv where you might see groups of elderly American tourists of the sort that are everywhere in Florence or Siena. They go down in single file into the tunnels and caves carrying thin candles. The orthodox style is to carry the candles between the fingers of your left hand leaving your right hand free for repeated crossing of yourself. The tunnels are so low that the head of someone of medium height brushes the ceiling and tall people walk along stooped and uncomfortable. In the caves are small wooden altars.

In niches in the tunnels are the covered bodies of saints, whose holiness has apparently ensured that their bodies remain intact and undecayed. Small coffins, covered in silk, contain the remains of child saints, some of whom had compelling religious visions and others were said to be able to perform miracles. Most of the walls are now white but some paintings remain. They are brown with age and are done in the iconic, pre-Rennaisance style, presumably frescoes painted on wet plaster. Given the number of people in the tunnels breathing on the paintings, their continued survival depends upon a miracle. One short, stout, female American tourist, whose plastic hip made her walking slightly unsteady and gave her a wary respect for steps, wore a tee shirt which informed everybody "I'm not dead yet", reminding me of the Dorothy Parker joke. When she was told that President Calvin Coolidge had died she replied "how could they tell?".

Above ground restoration is busily going on everywhere. Mechanical diggers gingerly excavate around ancient walls and towers and in one corner of the monastery new gold cupolas are arranged in rows on the ground alongside a stack of huge golden crosses, soon to be levitated and erected above the restored walls of the church. One of the two great churches is closed and being restored but the other, smaller church remains pretty much as it was, without the golden cupolas and with the paint flaking on the white walls. Inside the paintings have turned brown and indistinct with only the golden haloes surounding the heads of the saints shining out of the murk. This rather unrecontructed atmosphere creates a simpler, much less ornate aesthetic, which is paradoxically more appealing to contemporary sensibilities.

The church is crowded with people standing for the service. Most of the congrgation are young-ish women, all wearing headscarves. There are lots of priests in black cassocks, many of them young, singing the mesmerising orthodox chants in contrapunctal to the most senior, bearded priest in a tall hat. He intones in that remarkable basso profondo, which is the envy of male opera singers all over the world, but only to be truly encountered in orthodox priests. The devotion is remarkable. An extraordinary religious revival is clearly well advanced in the Ukraine.

The other great churches of Kyiv are St Michael's Cathedral, also now fully restored, and Santa Sophia, restored but as a museum, no longer as a church. St Michael's is more recent than the churches in the Lavra monastery. The walls are powder blue and flying buttresses hold them up. A plethora of gold cupolas, all crowded together, rise above the church alongside the bell tower. The interior is baroque, with golden screens and icons in gold frames. But, to my mind, Santa Sophia is the most remarkable of the three great churches. Set in its own tranquil gardens behind high walls, this 11th century church has a similar shape to Aya Sophia in Istanbul with half-domes surrounding the main dome. Above the main altar in the big dome are icons in gold moasics of Christ and the saints. Looking at these gorgeous mosaics the golden thread of Byzantium from Constantinople to Kyiv to St Marks in Venice is immediately drawn. Living in the penumbra of Ancient Greece, the Italian Rennaissance and the European Englightenment, westerners forget too easily the gorgeous stretch of the mystical Byzantine world, the Holy Roman Empire, and its continuing hold in the countries where orthodoxy thrives.

Santa Sophia has all its frescoes intact and restored and they are as lovely as anything in Rome or Florence. The angels and saints are set against pale blue skies and white clouds. All the faces express an intense human sensitivity. Here, a couple of centuries before the Italian Rennaisance, is the place where the iconic tradition of aloof, remote Gods and saints, disapproving of and judging humanity, are transformed into the saints who sympathise with our human failings and supplicate on our behalf to a forgiving God. That remarkable religious and aesthetic joining which dominated religious thinking from the Middle Ages until the beginning of our Godless twentieth century all over Europe seems to have happened here in the east first. Visiting with Arjeta, an Albanian from Kosovo, we were both moved to note that the orthodox heartbeat which is so profound in the Serb community (and coming here one can see why) will not be so easily surrendered for the banal secular prosperity promised by the European Union.

The strongest echoes of the Soviet era in Kyiv are to be discerned at the war memorial and in the Opera House. The war memorial is shaped like a concrete bunker and rusting Russian tanks encircle it. Monumental sculptures of the suffering people of the Ukraine, cut from the stone in the crude socialist realist style, line the walls of a tunnel. At the end you emerge into a park over which looms the gigantic silver Motherland statue. The iconography is the same as the Statue of Liberty, but the aesthetic is crude and the feeling engendered more tragic than heroic.

The people of the Ukraine suffered greatly alongside Russia in the Second World War. Many millions of Ukrainians died. More than 600,000 died in the defence of Kyiv alone. The sacrifices were tremendous and unimaginable and they loom vivid in the contemporary mind. Young people in Russia today will have been told by their Grannies when they were children to finish their food with a reminder that so many million Russians had starved to death and even those that had survived, had survived on little more than love, courage and fresh air. Now the feeling, so far as one can tell, Ukrainians have for Russia is ambivalent. Their culture, identity and history are almost mystically intertwined almost to the point of being indistinguishable, but their contemporary political interests are fraught and divisive.

The revolution that brought Viktor Yuschenko to power has been followed by internal division and international uncertainty. The Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, complete with the (false) plait across the crown of her head and the innocent appearance of a country girl, battles for eventual power in the Ukraine. Apparently many peasants in the Ukraine believe that the Ukraine will be saved by a woman and Tymoshenko seeks to appeal to that folklore. Russia and the European Union contemplate the political scene with concern, wondering which way Ukraine may turn and with what consequences.

The Opera House is an entirely unreformed Soviet-style institution. It is an ornate 19th century building, laid out in the same style as La Scala or La Fenice, with one set of stalls and five stacked rows of boxes in semi-circular balconies. The interior is mostly wooden and has been painted a pinky-biscuit colour, with gilded cherubs and curlicues. It's an attractive example of the form. The opera itself, Verdi's Macbeth, is played well by the orchestra and the singers have strong, distinctive voices, particularly MacDuff, but the set and the costumes are execrable. Great flats have been painted with hell-ish characters and they shake and tremble from time to time, like the set of an English sitcom in the 1970s. The costumes are standard-issue amateur dramatic: lacy, flowing red robes for the women, and loosely crocheted 'chain mail' for the men. Most of the time the performers are static. The entire mise en scene completely lacks the dramatic quality that should characterise operatic singing. The best thing to do is to close one's eyes and imagine that one is listening to the radio.

There are three intervals each more than half and hour long, but the bell starts ringing encouraging you to return to your seat after five minutes. In the interval you can have a delicious but unchilled glass of Crimean champagne, sold by quantity, with a bar of excellent Ukrainian chocolate. At the beginning of the third interval the lady selling the drinks and the chocolates is busily putting them away, removing any chance that you might buy one and thereby delay her early departure after another undemanding evening behind the bar.
Customer service in many places in Kyiv is appalling. When asked if we could order a second bottle of excellent Georgian wine the waitress in a (rather expensive) restaurant simply shrugged indifferently. When we asked the woman at the airport where we check in for British Airways she replied "you're too early. Go home."

But in the local fruit and vegetable market where no tourists go, except those with local friends, everyone is friendly and smiling. The Azerbaijani fruit seller gives a free peach to Katya, a pretty girl. The elderly woman selling cream cheese, offers a large blob to taste on the end of a knife. It's delicious and sour-sweet. Even the pig's heads sold at the butchers are smiling, with ears removed and tongues extracted laid neatly by the side. Next to them lie great rolls of pork fat, a great Ukrainian delicacy served cold or, if you like, dipped in chocolate. The Ukraine is a great food-producing country and it seems being close to food makes Ukrainians happy.

Out in the streets many pavements are broken down and many nineteenth century townhouses remain unrestored. One has a tree growing out of its roof. Belle epoque Kyiv evidently doesn't attract the beneficence that religious Kyiv does. On a backstreet, a young couple dressed for the occasion, are having their wedding photos taken in front of a graffiti-ed wall. This is a dress rehearsal, not the big day. The photos, if the setting is anything to go by, promise to be post-modern. On the same street a building site has been excavated but a disused train carriage remains rusting on the site. On the boilerplate an elderly man sits absolutely naked in the sunshine, crossing his legs and fixing me with an aggressive, disdainful stare. My resolve crumbles and I put the camera back in the bag.

Crossing the square with my three female friends, all senior international officials, two elderly women pass us and one says to the other "He must be rich to be able to afford three wives." I don't have time to think about this remark because I am too busy trying to get out of the way of the British Ambassador's Range Rover which is heading diagonally across a pedestrianised square and, in pursuit of another perfect photograph, I am in their way. Another diplomat tells me that the far right is rapidly on the rise amongst young unemployed men and a racist stabbing or murder occurs about once a month. Since I've only seen one other black person in Kyiv, I guess it's him or me next, so I'd better be careful, something I'm not generally keen on.
Back in the hotel, at 2.30 in the morning, my next door neighbour is on the phone. Only semi-awake, I think he is ordering room service. "how long will it take? twenty minutes is fine." As I soon discover he is ordering a prostitute. The walls of this quite expensive hotel are as thin as paper and I can hear everything. After much turning taps on and off and flushing toilets, everyone seems to have a satisfactory experience - twice - and then it's time for the girl to leave. Before she goes she asks if he would like her to come again the next day. He says yes; same time, same place. My heart sinks. She leaves. He goes to sleep. I remain awake for a long disturbed night contemplating the sacred and the profane.

www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets for pictures of Kyiv