From the author
A few years ago, at the residence of Anna Yaroslavna in Sanlis near Paris, I was asked to create a children's book about Queen Anne - with beautiful pictures and to be like questions and answers about the life of Anna Yaroslavna, with all the more or less known facts and legends.
"But how to submit them, when our historians refute each other almost every month? I thought rhetorically. — Some facts have very different interpretations, such as the image in Saint Sophia Cathedral, the year of birth, the story with the Gospel, and many other things..."
After the first illustrations by the famous Kateryna Shtanko, it became clear that the dry text would not go well with these sensual, fastidious pictures. The story had to be revived at least a little... Then a young guest came to Ukraine for summer vacation, and I decided to show her old Kyiv... And then fate brought me together with the famous painter Kateryna Kosyanenko, and the book was enriched with wonderful "chronic" images.
So now you have, as it were, two streams of narration - chronicle and fairy tale, because in Anna's time, this story would have been depicted in a "chronicle" style, and today each of us can illustrate it in our own way. Will you try?
