The Desiatynna Church was the first stone church of Kievan Rus, built on the site where, by the order of Prince Vladimir, two Christians, the infant John and his father Theodore, were sacrificed to the pagan god Perun. The construction of the temple was carried out by ancient Russian and Byzantine masters from 989 to 996, when Prince Vladimir Svyatoslavich allocated a tenth of his income for this purpose, which gave the church its name. The temple was dedicated to the Dormition of the Mother of God and represented a cross-domed six-pillar church, surrounded by galleries in the early 11th century. It was adorned with mosaics, frescoes, and carved marble and slate plates, while icons, crosses, and utensils were brought from Chersonesus Taurica. Here were buried Vladimir Svyatoslavich, his wife the Byzantine princess Anna, and the remains of Princess Olga, transferred from Vyshhorod. At the end of 1240, the hordes of Khan Batu destroyed the church, which served as the last refuge for the people of Kyiv.

Excavations of the ruins began in the 1630s at the initiative of Metropolitan Peter Mohyla, who discovered the sarcophagi of Prince Vladimir and his wife Anna. The skull of the prince was placed in the Church of the Transfiguration of the Lord and later transferred to the Dormition Church of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, while the bone and jaw were handed over to St. Sophia Cathedral. The remaining remains were reburied. At the site of the Desiatynna Church, Peter Mohyla built a church in honor of St. Nicholas, which stood until 1824. In 1758, the church was restored under the guidance of the nun Nektaria from the Florivskyi Monastery. In 1824, Metropolitan Evgeny Bolkhovitinov commissioned archaeologist K.A. Lokhvitsky to clear the foundation of the church, and in 1826, Efimov. Remnants of marble, mosaics, and jasper were found, but due to a lack of security, the excavations began to be looted.

On August 2, 1828, the construction of a new church began, the project of which was developed by St. Petersburg architect V.P. Stasov. The new temple, executed in the imperial Byzantine-Moscow style, was consecrated on July 15, 1842, by Metropolitan Filaret of Kyiv, Archbishop Nikanor of Zhytomyr, and Bishop Joseph of Smolensk. Several bricks from the Desiatynna Church were laid in the foundation of the Red Building of Kyiv University, symbolizing the connection of the university with the heritage of Prince Vladimir. In 1928, the church was destroyed by the Soviet authorities. In 1938-1939, an expedition from the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the USSR Academy of Sciences, led by M.K. Karger, conducted research on the remains of the church, discovering fragments of the mosaic floor, frescoes, stone tombs, and remnants of foundations. Nearby, the ruins of princely palaces, boyar dwellings, and craft workshops were found. The archaeological finds are kept in the Sofia Museum and the National Museum of the History of Ukraine, testifying to the style of Chersonesus and the early Byzantine era in which the church was built and decorated.