St. Sophia of Kyiv Cathedral’s Millennium in Contemporary Ukrainian Historiography (A Critical Survey)

Abstract

The paper is a critical survey of contemporary Ukrainian historiography about the dating for the founding of the St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv: 1011–1018 (Nikitenko–Kornienko theory), 1017 and 1037. The sources do not give any conclusive reasons for dating the cathedral by either 1011, or 1017, or 1037. Historiographical analysis and the critical consideration of the sources of the existing theories about the dating of the cathedral allows us to suppose that the construction of the Sophia of Kyiv took place in the second half or the end of the 1020s and the beginning or first half of the 1030s.