Pechersk takes its name — and its character — from the Pechersk Lavra monastery whose cave-network gave the district its medieval beginnings. Today it is the political and historical heart of Kyiv: the parliament, the Mariinsky Palace, the Cabinet of Ministers, and several embassies sit along its tree-lined streets, alongside the Lavra and the wartime memorials on the ridge.
It is also one of the city's wealthier residential districts, full of pre-revolutionary apartment buildings and Stalinist administrative blocks. The walk from the Lavra north along the Vichnoyi Slavy Park ridge takes in the Holodomor Memorial, the Motherland Monument, and the Eternal Glory Tomb — most of the city's twentieth-century memory in one afternoon.