Before you stands a memorial marker that offers a kind of answer to the question posed more than nine centuries ago by Nestor the Chronicler: “Where did the Rus’ land come from, who first began to rule there, and how did the Rus’ land arise?”
The stone was installed on the site of the earliest fortified detinets of princely Kyiv — and this is far more than a symbolic gesture. It is precisely from this settlement on Old Kyiv Hill that one can begin counting the history of the city and, more broadly, of the medieval state itself. Here, in the late 10th and 11th centuries, a military and political center emerged that united the East Slavic lands around it.
The monument was erected in the 1980s during the reconstruction of Old Kyiv Hill, based on a design by architect Avraam Miletsky. The inscription upon it is both a quotation and an invitation to reflection.
Primary Chronicle begins with a search for origins — and Nestor found those origins here, where the Dnipro River, the hills, and the first fortifications came together to form the image of a city destined to become the heart of an entire civilization.