Kief

Kieff, or Kiev, ke-ef', a city of southern Russia. It is situated on the Dnieper, almost due south of St. Petersburg, two-thirds of the distance to Odessa. It is called the "Mother City of Russia." Kief is older than Moscow. It was in the waters of the Dnieper, at Kief, that St. Vladimir, the first Russian saint, baptized his converts. Kief was the seat of the first Christian church, the first Christian school, and the first library in Russia. For 376 years it was a free commercial city; for eighty years it was in the hands of the Tartars; for forty-nine years it belonged to the Lithuanians; the Poles held it for ninety-eight years. In 1667 at the partition of Poland, it was reincorporated in the Russian empire. A church of St. Sophia is built on the plan of St. Sophia at Constantinople, but of one-fourth the size. A monastery near by guards caves or catacombs in which over a hundred saints lie entombed. It is a place of great sanctity, and is visited annually by a third of a million Russian pilgrims, adherents of the Greek Church. "On the night of August 15, 1872, 7,200 pilgrims were counted lying under the open sky." The commercial prosperity of the city has been promoted by the holding of great fairs. The present population is 247,432. Kief is in size the seventh city in Russia. There is a university with 2,500 students--one of the hotbeds of revolutionary ideas.