Did you know that 
Mykola Gogol depicted the character of his novel “The Viy” (1835), the theologian Khalyava, as a bell ringer, who walked time and again with a broken nose? In addition, the “good luck” of the theologian Khalyava was that he “was the bell ringer in the highest bell tower”!
The Great Lavra Bell Tower, a masterpiece created by Johann Gottfried Schedel, fascinated contemporaries not only with its architectural perfection but also with its impressive height for that time – 96.52 meters. Mykola Gogol, coming to Kyiv and visiting the Lavra, not only enjoyed seeing the incredible tower but also the picturesque Kyiv Dnipro Hills and the Transdnipro scenery, which he admired from the Andriyivskyi and Volodymyrskyi Hills, and could not resist the temptation to get a bird's-eye view of Kyiv and its vicinities. All it took was to climb the Lavra Bell Tower.
What an awful thing to happen! While climbing a spiral staircase, in the flight between the second and third tiers of the Bell Tower, Gogol stumbled and hurt his knee. It was on the third tier that the famous Lavra bells hung. Only three of the bells that the writer contemplated and heard – Balyk, Kopa, and Voznesenskyi – have survived to this day.
However, such an insignificant annoyance that happened to the author of “The Viy” while climbing the Lavra Bell Tower, cost the character of his book the theologian Khalyava not only a career in his academic education. Being a bell ringer “most of the time, he appeared with a broken nose, because the wooden stairs to the Bell Tower, was extremely carelessly made”.
There was even a legend in old Kyiv: the one who felt pain in his knee, rising from the second to the third tier of the Lavra Bell Tower, could see in the distance above the Bald Mountain an illusion resembling the silhouette of a young lady riding the loser Khoma Brut. It was possible to get rid of the vision by saying a prayer and crossing yourself three times.

Captions to illustrations:
Fig. 1. Great Lavra Bell Tower. The first third of the 20th century. (Photo from the collection of the National Preserve “Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra”, inv. № KPL-N-6278) 

Natalia Lytvyn