Andriyivskyy Descent and the old upper town: reading a city from one street

Kyiv is not an easy city to read. It was destroyed comprehensively in the thirteenth century, rebuilt slowly, remade as an imperial provincial capital in the nineteenth, damaged severely in the twentieth and rebuilt again in a Soviet idiom.

The result is a city where the layers do not sit neatly on top of one another. Andriyivskyy Descent is the exception — the one place where you can walk through most of the sequence in about twenty minutes.

The geography

The street connects the upper town, which is the ancient political and religious centre on the hills, with Podil, the low-lying merchant and craft district by the river.

That relationship is the whole history of the city in miniature. Power and the church were up on the heights; commerce, workshops and the port were down at the water. The descent is the physical link between the two, and it has been in use in some form for a very long time.

Saint Andrew's Church

At the top of the street stands the eighteenth-century Baroque church designed by Bartolomeo Rastrelli, the architect responsible for much of imperial Saint Petersburg. It sits on a steep artificial terrace, visible from a considerable distance, and it is among the finest Baroque buildings in the country.

Its placement is deliberate. Local tradition holds that the Apostle Andrew raised a cross on this hill and prophesied that a great city would rise here. Whether or not one takes the legend seriously, the church marks the spot where Kyiv's founding story is located, and it is unusual to have that so precisely sited.

The craft market

Since the late 1980s the street has been an open-air market — the place where, in the last years of the Soviet Union, artists and craftspeople could sell directly for the first time in decades.

What is on offer now is a mixture. A good deal of it is mass-produced tourist merchandise, and the embroidered goods in particular are frequently machine-made imports sold as handwork. But genuine craftspeople still work here — ceramicists, woodcarvers, jewellers, painters — and the difference is visible if you look at the finish and ask who made it.

The general rule applies: the sellers who can describe the process are usually the makers.

What else is on the street

The Mikhail Bulgakov house museum, at the address where the writer of The Master and Margarita spent much of his youth. Several small galleries. The One Street Museum, which documents the history of the descent itself and is a genuinely charming piece of local historiography.

And a number of nineteenth-century merchant houses in varying states of repair, some restored beautifully and some visibly waiting for someone to take an interest.

Why it is worth the time

Practical advice for anyone visiting Kyiv for business: this is the one hour of sightseeing that will actually help you understand the city. The upper town explains its political and religious history, Podil at the bottom explains its commercial history, and the walk between them is short.

It is best in the early morning before the stalls open, or in the evening after they close, when the street returns to being a very old road down a hill.

Related in this archive

• Tourism: what the sector was, and what a recovery would require
• Kyiv for the visiting professional: districts, distances and what is worth the time
• Kyiv's traffic and the transport economics behind it
• Ukraine Annual Review 2010: recovery on two channels

I am not equipped to read this street's layers; for me it has been the place I took visitors for many years. The one thing I noticed is that the goods on the stalls had changed every time I went and the street was still doing the same job — explaining the city to a stranger. Some places keep their function regardless of their contents.