The Church of St. Nicholas is a Neoclassical style rotunda in the Askold's Grave park of Kyiv, Ukraine.
This former Russian Orthodox church was designed in 1809 by the Moscow-born architect Andrey Melensky and was underwritten by Samuil Meshcheryakov, a merchant from Voronezh.
The general contractor for the project was Vasiliy Serikov. The construction cost 8,000 rubles and the church was consecrated on 1 September 1810.
After the establishment of the Soviet regime, the church was closed, but in 1921-1934, it still functioned as a parish church of the UAOC. In 1934, the church was finally closed, and the cemetery was destroyed to make way for an amusement park.
In 1936, the church was rebuilt into a restaurant, and in 1938, architect Petro Yurchenko quite wittily converted the former church into a park pavilion, adding a through Ionic colonnade instead of a dome.[1] At the same time, the early twentieth-century bell tower, the rector's house, and the 1860s fence were demolished.
In this form, the church existed until the last restoration in 1997-1998 (architect Volodymyr Khromchenkov), when the original appearance of the building was restored. On April 26, 1992, the church was transferred to the religious community of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. A church in the name of St. Sylvester the Pope is now also located in the semi-basement. The restored St. Nicholas Church was consecrated on May 22, 1998, by the then Exarch of Kyiv-Vyshhorod Lubomyr Husar.
The Church of St. Nicholas on Askold's Grave is also famous for being the first church visited by Pope John Paul II during his apostolic visit to Ukraine in the summer of 2001.[2]
On July 15, 2010, the restored crypt in the basement of the church was consecrated, where the martyrs for the faith Askold and Dir are buried.[3]
In 2016-2017, a bell tower was built on the territory of Askold's Grave at the expense of the parish of the Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker on Askold's Grave, where 51 bells were installed and consecrated on May 22, 2019, on St. Nicholas the Warm Day, during the church holiday of the UGCC of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker on Askold's Grave.
The bells were made in the Netherlands. And all the electronics that can be used to perform a variety of classical and spiritual melodies were made by talented engineers from Kyiv, brothers Serhiy and Leonid Botvinko." On March 10, 2023, Dmytro Kotsiubailo "Da Vinci Wolves", Hero of Ukraine, commander of the 1st separate mechanized battalion "Da Vinci Wolves", was buried in the church and buried nearby.[4]