Dust, lilac, and warm stone

"The easiest of Kiev's pasts to re-create in the imagination is the raucous commercial city of the pre-revolutionary sugar boom. The novelist Aleksandr Kuprin, writing in the 1910s, described a town full of stevedores and pilgrims, Jewish hawkers, German madams, down-at-heel Russian officers, students, card-players, cigar smoke and cheap champagne. Most of Kiev's surviving historic centre — ponderous opera house, cobbled boulevards and the extraordinary Chimera House, barnacled with frogs, deer and rhinoceroses, that advertised the city's first cement factory -- dates from then, and on summer evenings the streets still smell,as in Kuprin's day, of 'dust, lilac and warm stone'; riverboats whistle on the Dnieper and men drink kvass out of jam jars at little booths under the chestnut trees. A museum on Andriyivsky Uzviz, the helter-skelter lane that plunges down from Catherine II's rococo St Andrew's Church to Contract Square, once the site of a great annual fair, houses an atmospheric rag-bag of period ephemera: sepia photographs of uniformed cadets lounging against a studio balustrade, a pair of white suede gloves, a painted umbrella, ivory elephants, a stereoscope, a curlicued shop-till, a velvet opera cloak trimmed with ostrich feathers."

From Anna Reid's Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine. Photo, detail from Chimera House in Kyev.