Kyiv’s Church of St Cyril of Alexandria: A Portal of Orthodox Ecumenism

The present article explores the place of visual culture in the intellectual networks that bound Kyiv to other medieval centres. It positions Kyiv as a cultural and intellectual node, where the medieval craft of thought and of image making flourished. The article takes as its subject the mid to late-twelfth century Church of St Cyril of Alexandria, one of the two most significant surviving medieval structures in Kyiv. It does not survey the entire church, but focuses on the south apse, which preserves a fresco cycle depicting the life of St Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376-444). The fresco cycle is the only known representation of the life of the Alexandrian prelate, who, as one of the leading church fathers of Early Christianity, was lauded for his doctrinal victory over Nestorios at the Third Ecumenical Council of Ephesos in 431. There is no evidence of another ecclesiastical foundation dedicated to the St Cyril in the Orthodox world. Not only is the imagery preserved in the Kyiv church unique in its subject matter, but the context for the creation of this imagery remains oddly under-researched. This article proposes a completely new analysis of the fresco cycle, one that highlights mid-twelfth-century cultural and ecclesiastical preoccupations in Kyiv and Constantinople. It uses unpublished Byzantine sources, which, coupled with the internal evidence of the images, suggests that the Kyiv cycle was skilfully constructed of mnemonic visual schemes most likely in response to a mid-twelfth-century surge in St Cyril’s popularity in the context of the theological debate on the meaning of the words ‘Thou art He Who offers and is offered and receives’ in the Prayer of the Cherubikon. In doing so, the article positions Kyiv as an intercon¬nected intellectual-cultural loci in an ecumenical network, where parameters of time and space and the mobility and mixing of ideas and practices generate difference out of similarities, but also engendered expansive commonalities that extended beyond polities. It suggests how ideas may have travelled, who may have transported them, how they became domesticated and naturalised upon arrival, and what role images played in this communicative proces