Thursday, October 20, 2011

The Golden Gates

I have heard about these before...the Golden Gates.  This was the entrance to Kiev when it had a city wall build entirely around it.  Legend has that it had Golden Gates, but now it has none at all.  Usually you can walk through it, but this day they were having some type of film festival and they had blocked the entrance so that they could watch movies inside.

This shows what it originally looked like.  Obviously the dirt and timbers extended out to the left and right of the gate, but it is "earth thrown up with a workmanship of timbers above" that.  I had heard of how cities defended themselves this way, but had never seen an actual representation of it.  As soon as I saw this, it clicked with the description in my head.

This is the side where they had a monument to someone (we were not always able to decipher statues, etc.  For some crazy reason they rarely had anything listed in English.  Sometimes they did not even have it in Russian preferring to have it in Ukrainian only.).  I don't have a picture of the monument but let me tell you that when they do monuments, they are serious about it.  They are almost always huge.

This is on the 3rd or 4th floor?  I lost count.  Lots of climbing in this fort.  You can see over my shoulder our next stop, St. Sophia's.

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