You have seen them here, in this journal, more times than I can count.
When I needed a way to show you Kyiv, I reached for them. When I needed an image for home, I reached for them again.
By now, you know them the way you know a street near your own house.
In Orthodox Christianity, a lavra is one of the highest names a monastery can carry. It is given to places that have lived long enough to become more than stone.
The Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra has stood above the Dnipro River for almost a thousand years.
It was here when Moscow was still forest.
Last night, a Russian drone struck the roof of its cathedral and set it on fire.
This cathedral was destroyed once before, during the Second World War. Ukraine built it again. Last night, Russia came for it once more.
It was my city burning, the oldest part of it on fire in the dark. Flames between the domes. Smoke rising over a place where people have prayed for centuries.
I felt sick before I had words for it.
This place belongs to more than me. It belongs to more than Ukraine. The world itself named it a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a treasure that belongs to all of humanity, including people who will never set foot here.
When a place like this burns, the loss does not stop at our border, because Russia decided to burn something that belongs to all of us.
Russia, as usual, says it did not do this. Their ministry claims that one of our own missiles fell there by accident.
Our own missiles, of course.
The fragments on the ground say, surprise, a Russian drone.
Photo: Ukraine’s Security Service has identified the drone that struck Kyiv Pechersk Lavra during Russia’s overnight attack on Kyiv on June 15 as a Geran-2, the Russian version of the Iranian-designed Shahed kamikaze drone.
Their own propagandists used to swear on television that Kyiv’s holy places were untouchable. They said no one in Moscow would ever give the order to strike the Lavra.
The order was given.
This was not for a warehouse of weapons. There is no arsenal under those domes, and they know it.
There was no battlefield under those domes. Only prayer, stone, memory, and the old stubborn proof that Ukraine was here.
They aimed at the Lavra because they wanted us to feel that nothing we love is out of their reach.
They wanted the world to see that a thread running back a thousand years could be burned in a single night.
This is the place many of you told me you would come and see when the war is over.
They aimed at that.
The same night, in Kharkiv, Russia struck a building. When rescuers came to put out the fire, Russia struck the same place again. Five people there were killed, including those who had come to save others.
Eleven people across Ukraine did not see the morning.
The cathedral can be rebuilt.
They cannot.
This is why we mourn the people first. Always. The fathers, sons, friends, colleagues, the hands that ran toward fire because that was their duty.
Then, we mourn the places that hold our country’s memory.
By morning, people were carrying the old icons out through the smoke by hand. Things that cannot be reprinted or ordered again.
Things that survived centuries of madness, and survived once more because someone walked into the damage and carried them out.
UNESCO recognized this place as part of the world’s inheritance. A jewel of history with no equal on Earth.
Russia treated it as something to burn.
If a thousand years can burn inside a World Heritage site in Kyiv, it can burn anywhere.
World Heritage means a place belongs to all of us because humanity would not fully recognize itself without it.
It was yours before it burned.
It is yours now that it must be defended.
—Viktor
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There’s no team here. Just me, in Ukraine, four years in. I keep this open to everyone and always will. Paid subscribers are the guardians who keep it that way. Stand with them, or read for free, you belong here either way.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
borderslynn 