Night Boat to Cairo?

I took one step beyond and boarded a night train to Kiev. The train was a sleeper making the eight hour journey a lot more comfortable than it could have been. Russian customs woke me up to stamp a departure date in my passport and the Ukrainian customs waking me up half an hour later to give me an immigration stamp brought me out of my beauty sleep temporarily. We took a metro to the hotel I'd conveniently booked on Kiev's main street, Vulitsya Kreshchatyk. The main square below, which looks like a kid has gone crazy with a construction set, is awash with various monuments and billboards providing an unusual contrast to the historical buildings of the city.
The first destination, after dumping our bags at the hotel, was the Kievo Pecherskka Lavra, a monastery complex of churches and caves founded almost 1000 years ago.
The walls of Orthodox churches are covered in frescoes inside but it's more unusual to see them on the outside.

Unfortunately it's not acceptable to take pictures either inside the churches or in the caves where the monks had retreated many centuries ago to find solitude. Even for a heathen such as me the splendour of the churches and the piety of the other visitors made me feel humble, if not religious.