This is a monument to the Ukrainian printing pioneer Ivan Fedorov. He arrived, as he wrote, “to the God-saved city of Lviv” in 1574, escaping from the wild Muscovy. When he printed his first book in Moscow, the local monks complained to Tsar Ivan the Terrible that they, inspired by the Holy Spirit, were creating handwritten books, and this charlatan arrived and stamped the same books with the help of a demons’ machine. Tsar believed the monks, who lost their competitor this way, and as for Fedorov, he barely managed to escape.

In Lviv the printing pioneer turned to the rich people to help him in book printing, but none of them responded. Then Fedorov turned to the poor artisans and workers, and they of their last money (“as the widow who sacrificed the last contribution” as the printing pioneer wrote) provided the financial side of the first books in Ukraine publication. Thenames of these books are The Apostle and Grammar.

There is one interesting fact: in the whole world there are about a hundred copies of The Apostle (Acts and Epistles of the Holy Apostles) of the 1574 Lviv edition. Even the unknown copies of The Apostle from the Ukrainian ex-presidents and people’s deputies’ collections sometimes appear to public. But there is the only copy of Grammar, cherished at Harvard University in the United States. Since the circulation of the two books was approximately the same – about one and a half thousand copies, one can imagine how much younger generation of that time valued education.

In 1585 in Lviv the Uspensky Stauropeigious Brotherhood Printing House was founded. It is the oldest steady functioning printing house in Eastern Europe. And in 1586 the Statute of the Uspensky Stauropeigious Brotherhood School was issued. It is the oldest pedagogical document on the post-Soviet territories.