The white-and-green exterior is eighteenth-century Ukrainian Baroque, but it is a shell: inside stands the eleventh-century church, the oldest in Ukraine, with original mosaics no restorer has redone. In the apse the five-metre Virgin Orans has looked down from her gold ground for a thousand years. The tower stairs carry secular frescoes — musicians, acrobats, hunts — that describe the court of Kyiv better than any chronicle.