*Location:

   Gatehouse belltower
   St.Michael's Cathedral & Monastery
   Mykhalivs'ka ploscha
   Kiev (Kyiv, Kijev), Ukraine
   LL: N 50.45567, E 30.52178

Site locator map
City locator maps and gazetteer page

*Carillonist:

   (unknown)

*Contact:

   St.Michael's Cathedral
   Mykhalivs'ka ploscha
   Kiev, Ukraine
   T: 278 89 56

*Schedule:

   Automatic play of a different Ukrainian
   folk melody each hour around the
   clock, with Ukrainian hymn before 1200
   and 2400; quarter tunes are fixed.

*Remarks:

   Cast by Ukrainian founders;
   bass bell 8 tonnes, treble 2 kg.
   All bells have crowns and are strapped
   to timbers slung in steel frames.
   Some basses much older; instrument has
   grown in stages, and might originally
   have been a zvon.  Controls installed
   by firm Schmidhofer Klement, who
   report a carillon of 36 bells playable
   automatically or via baton keyboard.
   A 2005 report stated 40 bells.

*Technical data:

   Traditional carillon of 50 bells
   Pitch of heaviest bell (excluding sub-bourdon) is unknown
   Transposition is unknown
   Keyboard range: (??)C C 50/(??)C B 25
   There is one missing bass semitone
   The whole instrument was installed in 1997
     with bells made by the maker cited in Remarks above
   Auxiliary mechanisms: E     
   Tower details not available
   Year of latest technical information source is 2007

The Wikipedia article on this building details its sad history under Soviet rule and its reconstruction in 1997-98, but it barely mentions the bells.  The larger version of the photograph there (showing the tower and cathedral) is also available from Wikimedia.
Wikimedia image of an old postcard showing the original belltower

The Ukrainian Wikipedia article about the monastery has a section about the tower, which mentions the carillon.  There is an embedded video (3:34) which consists mainly of still photos of the building, with an audio track of the noontime tune and hour strike; it does show glimpses of the bells.  It ends with a list of the tunes that are played hourly around the clock.
The English equivalent, though more readable for most Western visitors, is shorter, and barely mentions the bells

The Ukrainian Wikipedia article about the bell tower (which has no equivalent in other languages) has two photos of the bells, but there is no real description of the carillon.  Destroyed in 1934-36, the tower was reconstructed in 1998; the bells are in the middle level.

A YouTube video (1:12, Apr.2009) shows these bells being played as a zvon.

A page from the blog of a visiting American jurist has five photos of bells and keyboard, all clickable to view huge versions with great detail.

Stock photo of the belltower and cathedral
Stock photo of the belltower and cathedral; "Image zoom" allows high-resolution inspection of any detail but not the whole photo at once.

Video (1:10) of the bells, showing a very strange arrangement

Atlas photo of the belltower and cathedral

Stock photo of the belltower illuminated at night

Night photo of the tower and the square before it

A visitor's photo of the gatehouse belltower and the church

Frontal view of the top of the clocktower
Side view of the top of the clocktower

Where this work lies in the sequence of output of unidentified bellfoundries, in this region and in the world.

Ranking among all European traditional carillons by pitch (weight).
Ranking among all European traditional carillons by size (number of bells).
Ranking among all European traditional carillons by year of completion.

Where the bass bell of this carillon ranks among all great bells in Europe.

Index to all traditional carillons in Ukraine.

Index to all tower bell instruments in Ukraine.

   This page was built from the database on 26-May-22
   based on textual data last updated on 2022/05/23
   and on technical data last updated on 2007/11/16