'The city consists of three parts, of three several towns — Podd, Vichgorod, Pechersk; a business town, an imperial town, and a sacred town. All these quarters are crowded with offices, shops, and convents; yet Podd is the merchant quarter, Vichgorod the government quarter, and Pechersk the pilgrim quarter. These towns overhang the Dnieper, on a range of broken cliffs; contain about 70,000 souls; and hold, in the several places of interment, all that was mortal of the Pagan Duke, who became her foremost saint.
' Kiev is a city of legends and events; the preaching of St. Andrew, the piety of St. Olga, the conversion of St.
Vladimer; the Mongolian assault, the Polish conquest, the recovery by Peter the Great. The provinces around Kiev resemble it, and rival it in historic fame. The country of Mazeppa and Gonta, the Ukraine teems with story, tales of the raid, the flight, the night attack, the revolted town. Every village has its legend, every town its epic, of love and war. The land is aglow with personal life. Yon chapel marks the spot where a Grand Duke was killed, this mound is the tomb of a Tartar horde, that field is the site of a battle with the Poles. The men are brighter and livelier, the houses are better built, and the fields are better trimmed, than in the north and east. The music is quicker, the brandy is stronger, the beer is warmer, the hatred is keener, than you find elsewhere. These provinces are Gogol's country, and the scenery is that of his story called " Dead Souls."
' Like all the southern cities Kiev fell into the power of Batu Khan, the Mongol chief, and groaned for ages under the yoke of Asiatic begs. These begs were idol worshippers, and under their savage and idolatrous rule the children of Vladimer had to pass through heavy trials j but Kiev can boast that in the worst of times she kept in her humble churches, and her underground caves, the sacred embers of her faith alive.
' Below the tops of two high hills, three miles from that Vichgorod in which Vladimer built his harem, and raised the statue of his Pagan god, some Christian hermits, — Anton, Feodosie, and their fellows, dug for themselves in the loose red rock a series of corridors and caves, in which they lived and died, examples of lowly virtue and Christian life. The Russian word for cave is "peck," and the site of these caves was called Peckersk. Above the cells in which these hermits dwelt two convents gradually arose, and took the names of Anton and Feodosie, now become the patron saints of Kiev, and the reputed fathers of all men living in Russia a monastic life.
' A green dip between the old town, now trimmed and planted, parts the first convent - -that of Anton — from the cityj; a second dip divides the convent of Feodosie from that of his fellow-saint. These convents, nobly planned, and strongly built, take rank among the finest piles in Eastern Europe. Domes and pinnacles of gold surmount each edifice; and every wall is pictured with legends from the lives of saints. The ground is holy; more than a hundred hermits lie in the catacombs, and crowds of holy men lie mouldering in every niche of the holy wall. Mouldering! I crave their pardons. Holy men can never rust and rot! The purity of the flesh in death is evidence of the purity of the flesh in life; and saints are just as incorruptible of body as of soul! In Anton's convent you are shown the skull of St. Vladimer; that is to say, a velvet pall in which his skull is said to be wrapped and swathed. You are told that the flesh is pure, the skin uncracked, and the odour sweet. A line of dead bodies fills the underground passages and lanes — each body in a niche of the rock; and all these martyrs of the faith are said to be like Vladimer — also fresh and sweet!... Fifty thousand pilgrims, chiefly Ruthenians, from the populous provinces of Podolia, Kiev, and Volhinia, come in summer to these shrines.
' When Kiev received her freedom from the Tartar begs she found herself by the chance of war a city of Polonia, not of Muscovy; a m'ember of the western, not of the eastern, section of her race. Kiev had never been Russ, as Moscow was Russ; a rude barbaric town, with crowds of traders and rustics, ruled by a Tartarised court; and now that her lot was cast with the more liberal and enlightened west, she grew into a yet more Oriental Prague. For many reigns she lay open to the arts of Germany and France; and when she returned to Russia, in the time of Peter the Great, she was not alone the noblest jewel in his crown, but a point of union, nowhere else to be found, for all the Sclavonic nations in the world.