49 Fun Facts About Kyiv

Kyiv straddles both banks of which river?

The Dnieper. It carried the great medieval trade route between Scandinavia and Constantinople, and that traffic is what turned an early Slavic settlement into a rich city.

Which giant cargo plane, built in Kyiv and the heaviest aircraft ever flown, was destroyed in the 2022 invasion?

An-225 Mriya, whose name means 'dream'. Built in the 1980s to carry the Soviet space shuttle on its back, the only one ever finished was wrecked in its hangar outside the city in February 2022.

Kyiv's monument to its four legendary founders shows them standing in what?

A boat. The sister stands at the bow with her arms spread and her three brothers, Kyi among them, behind her; put up for the city's 1,500th anniversary in 1982, it partly collapsed in 2010 and was rebuilt.

What was the name of the sister of Kyiv's three legendary founding brothers?

Lybid. A small river that runs through Kyiv still carries her name, its valley long since built over by the growing city.

Which people captured Kyiv in the mid-9th century, ending Khazar tribute?

The Varangians. By the chronicle's account a second band of them came down from Novgorod in 882, killed the rulers Askold and Dir, and made Kyiv the capital of Rus'.

Whose forces completed the destruction of Kyiv in 1240?

Batu Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan. His army stormed the city in December 1240 and rode on into Poland and Hungary the following year.

Which city was the capital of Soviet Ukraine before Kyiv took over in 1934?

Kharkiv had been the Bolsheviks' capital since the civil war. In 1934 the regime moved the government back to Kyiv, calling it 'the natural geographic center' of Ukraine.

Which grand prince had the people of Kyiv baptised en masse in the river in 988?

Volodymyr I. He took the new faith as the price of marrying the Byzantine emperor's sister, had the pagan idols pulled down, and ordered the townspeople into the water.

Ukraine's 2018 KyivNotKiev campaign asked foreign media to drop a spelling taken from which language?

Russian. 'Kiev' follows the Russian form of the name; within a year of the foreign ministry's campaign the Associated Press had switched, and the BBC and several big newspapers followed.

The Primary Chronicle credits which grand prince with founding Kyiv's St Sophia Cathedral in 1037?

Yaroslav the Wise, in the chronicle's telling, raised it to mark a victory over steppe raiders at the city's gates. His marble sarcophagus still stands inside.

Which country won the Euro 2012 football final played at Kyiv's Olympic Stadium?

Spain. They had gone 44 years without a major title before 2008; beating Italy 4–0 that night made it three in a row: European, world and European again.

Which revered icon did Prince Andrey Bogolyubsky carry north from Vyshhorod, near Kyiv, in 1155?

Our Lady of Vladimir, a Greek icon brought to Vyshhorod from Constantinople, took its name from the northern town he made his capital. Fourteen years later his army sacked Kyiv itself.

After the Battle of Blue Waters in 1362, Kyiv passed from the Golden Horde to which rising power?

Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Grand Duke Algirdas defeated the Tatars in the steppe, annexed the Kyiv lands and installed his own son as their prince.

Which 1569 union transferred Kyiv to the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland?

Lublin. The same union gave the nobles of the Kyiv region the rights and privileges of the Polish nobility, inside a new joint state that was one of the largest in Europe.

Which Cossack hetman made a triumphal entry into Kyiv after his victories over the Poles in 1648?

Bohdan Khmelnytsky entered through the old Golden Gate and was hailed as a Moses who had freed his people from Polish captivity.

Kyiv's national university, founded in 1834, is now named after which poet?

Taras Shevchenko. Arrested in 1847, he was sent to serve as a private soldier for his anti-tsarist poems; Nicholas I himself forbade him to write or paint, and he wrote on in secret.

In 1892 Kyiv opened the Russian Empire's first line of which kind of public transport?

Electric tram. Horse-drawn cars had started only a year earlier, but teams of horses could not haul them up the city's steep hills, so Kyiv went electric.

At which site on Kyiv's edge did German forces shoot nearly 34,000 Jews in two days in September 1941?

Babyn Yar. The shootings at the ravine went on until just before the Red Army retook the city in November 1943, and Roma, Soviet prisoners and Ukrainian civilians died there too.

Which main street of Kyiv was blown up by mines the retreating Soviets left behind in 1941?

Khreshchatyk. The charges went off days after the Germans moved in and wrecked most of its buildings; after the war it was rebuilt in the Stalinist style, more than twice as wide.

Which aviation pioneer, born in Kyiv in 1889, built the world's first four-engine aeroplane?

Igor Sikorsky. He was sketching helicopters as a Kyiv student, flew his four-engine giant in 1913, left after the revolution and in America built the first helicopter to go into mass production.

Ukraine's parliament declared independence in Kyiv on 24 August 1991, days after the collapse of what?

A coup in Moscow. Hardline communists had tried to oust Gorbachev that week; once the plot failed, deputies in Kyiv voted to leave, and a December referendum backed them in every region.

Who became mayor of Kyiv in June 2014?

Vitali Klitschko, the former heavyweight boxing champion. He had lost the 2006 race to Leonid Chernovetskyi and lost again in 2008 before winning at the third attempt.

Kyiv's Paton Bridge, opened in 1953, was a pioneering large bridge assembled entirely by which method?

Welding. It carries the name of Yevhen Paton, the Kyiv engineer whose automatic welding had been put to work on tanks in the war; he died that August, three months before the bridge opened.

The magnate Lazar Brodsky, who paid for Kyiv's grand Brodsky Synagogue in 1898, made his fortune in what?

Sugar. The Soviets shut his synagogue and for decades it housed a puppet theatre; it was handed back to the Jewish community in the 1990s and restored as a place of worship.

Which monastery joins St. Sophia Cathedral on the city's UNESCO World Heritage listing?

Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, the Monastery of the Caves, begun in the 11th century by monks living in caves above the river. In 2023 UNESCO put both sites on its danger list because of the war.

Five days after the 1986 Chernobyl explosion, Soviet leaders had Kyiv go ahead with which public event?

The May Day parade. Marchers filled the city centre as usual while radiation levels were rising and alarmed parents were already getting their children out of town.

Which palace in Kyiv did Rastrelli design for Empress Elizabeth in the 1740s?

Mariinskyi. Damaged by fire and neglected for decades, it was rebuilt in 1870 for a visit by Alexander II and Empress Maria, who gave it her name.

In 2023 the Soviet emblem on the shield of Kyiv's giant Mother Ukraine statue was replaced with what?

A trident, the national coat of arms. The 102-metre monument went up in 1981 with a hammer and sickle on its shield; workers cut the Soviet emblem away in August 2023 and fixed the new one in its place.

Which whimsical Kyiv building is famous for its animal sculptures?

House with Chimaeras. Władysław Horodecki put it up as an apartment block; it stands opposite the president's office and since 2005 has been used to receive foreign guests.

Kyiv first hosted the Eurovision Song Contest in 2005 thanks to which singer's win with 'Wild Dances'?

Ruslana. The contest came back to Kyiv in 2017 after Jamala won with '1944', a song about Stalin's deportation of the Crimean Tatars.

Which tree is a symbol of Kyiv and featured on its 1969-1995 coat of arms?

Horse chestnut. Rows of them were planted along the main street when it was rebuilt after the war, and it is said you can cross Kyiv in summer without leaving the shade of its trees.

Which honorary Soviet title did Kyiv receive for its defence against the German invasion of 1941?

Hero City. The honour marked a defence that had ended in disaster: by late September 1941 the Germans had encircled and captured hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops around Kyiv.

Andriivskyi Descent includes the home of which Kyiv-born writer?

Mikhail Bulgakov. The family house at No. 13 became the Turbins' home in his civil-war novel The White Guard, and it is now a museum to him.

Which famous farmers' market sits in the very centre of Kyiv?

Bessarabskyi. Its hall was built with money that Lazar Brodsky, a Kyiv magnate who died in 1904, left the city in his will for a covered market.

Which star's concert marked the 2011 reopening of Kyiv's Olympic Stadium?

Shakira sang at the opening in October 2011. The Soviet-era bowl had been rebuilt with a new roof so that it could stage the final of football's Euro 2012 the following summer.

The breaded cutlet known as chicken Kyiv is traditionally wrapped around a core of what?

Butter, usually worked with garlic and herbs. Nobody has proved where the dish was first cooked, but in 2022 British supermarkets respelt its name 'chicken Kyiv' in solidarity with Ukraine.

Which Kyiv school, closed by the tsar in 1817, was revived as a university in 1991?

Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Formed in 1632 under Petro Mohyla and backed by Cossack hetmans, it went on to educate generations of Ukraine's clergy and Cossack elite.

The Vernadsky Library in Kyiv holds a UNESCO-listed archive of Jewish folk music from 1912–47 recorded on what?

Wax cylinders. Collectors took phonographs into Jewish towns and villages to record the songs; the archive was long believed destroyed in the war, until it turned up in the library in the 1990s.

Roughly how deep below ground are the platforms of Kyiv's Arsenalna metro station?

105 metres. The line had to run beneath the high bluff on which the old city stands; Arsenalna was long the deepest station in the world, until one in Chongqing, China, overtook it.

The Kyiv Funicular links the Uppertown with which lower neighbourhood?

Podil, the old riverside quarter of merchants and craftsmen, whose name means 'lower part'. The funicular opened in 1905 and still has only two stations, one at each end of the slope.

Before the 2022 invasion closed Ukraine's skies, which airport was Kyiv's main international gateway?

Boryspil, about 30 km east of the centre, handled roughly two-thirds of Ukraine's air passengers. As of 2025 it had seen no scheduled flights since the invasion began on 24 February 2022.

Which Israeli prime minister was born in Kyiv?

Golda Meir. Her earliest memory was of her father boarding up the front door against a rumoured pogrom, and when she was eight the family followed him to Milwaukee.

Which WhatsApp co-founder was born in Kyiv?

Jan Koum. He left for California at 16 with his mother; they lived on food stamps while he swept the floors of a grocery store, years before the messaging app made him a billionaire.

Which Hollywood actress was born in Kyiv in 1975, the daughter of a Soviet film actress?

Milla Jovovich. Her mother, Galina Loginova, was under contract to a Kyiv film studio; the family left the Soviet Union in 1980, and Milla grew up in California to star in the Resident Evil films.

A peninsula named after Kyiv lies on which continent?

Antarctica. Bulgaria's Antarctic place-names commission named the Kyiv Peninsula in 2010 because Ukraine's Antarctic research station, Vernadsky, stands on a nearby island.

Which archangel appears on Kyiv's coat of arms?

Michael. The Soviet-era arms adopted in 1969 left him out, and he returned in 1995.

Who appoints the head of the Kyiv City State Administration?

The president of Ukraine. Because the mayor is elected separately, the two posts can be split: in 2010 a presidential decree took the executive job away from a sitting mayor and left him only the title.

Which Kyiv square was the centre of both the 2004 Orange Revolution and the protests of 2013–14?

Independence Square, the Maidan. It was given that name on 26 August 1991, two days after parliament's declaration, and has been the stage for Ukraine's mass protests ever since.

A German chronicler of the early 11th century credited Kyiv with more than 400 of which buildings?

Churches. Thietmar of Merseburg also counted eight markets, and the building boom of those decades made Kyiv an architectural rival of Constantinople.