Mokykla of the Magnification
The Mokykla of the Magnification (Lutoborian: zbilʹšennja mokikla) is a Vaestic school in the city of Zhytomir, in southern Lutoborsk. The Mokykla of the Magnification is regarded as the most prestigious mokykla in the country, and as a Banner-Shrine it holds the honour of being the permanent resting place of the physical Banner of the Wide North, the Banner of the modern Lutoborian state.
The mokykla was established in 1634 – just two years after the Banner had been placed in the hands of Bronimir II as it was brought back into Prostration – and it was called into service to become the Banner-Shrine in 1655, at the height of Lutoborsk’s blood-spattered “Red Decade”, given the position of Zhytomir as one of the fortresses of local Vaestism. The mokykla was rebuilt in 1675, at the direction of the then vozhd Svorad, as the centrepiece of the new city after much of Zhytomir had been destroyed early in 1673 in an attack by the Lutoborian Exiles, a group largely composed of rebellious Sirian High Nobles which had been exiled to the steppe a generation earlier after their defeat in the Great War of Enlightenment.
With the damage to the city fresh in everyone’s memory, the new mokykla was deliberately built in a fashion which, it was thought, would offer greater protection – by digging an immense pit in the ground (roughly two kilometres to the south of the original site) and building an entire floor of the new complex below ground level. Zhytomir locals thus often refer to it as mokikla v zemli, “the mokykla in the ground”. The Banner itself was returned from a hiding place – this is traditionally claimed to be the Caves of Prapuret on the southern shore of Lake Vlodoma – and ceremonially re-emplaced in the new mokykla in Dominy 1676. Given the precarious position of Zhytomir within striking distance of the border with Great Doyotia, the need to evacuate the Banner has indeed been manifested many times over the years – including several instances during the First Peridot War (1723–30).
Zhytomir was attacked by the Three Power Bloc during the spring of 1949, with the city falling to Zemayan units on 10 Floridy. In an exemplary action, the mokykla was deliberately targeted by Zemayan mortar fire. Although stubborn defence succeeded in holding the Zemayans away from the mokykla, more than a third of the building’s physical structure was shattered, including the central chamber in which the Banner is stored. Part of the chamber’s ceiling was blown open and broke away; one of the banner-guards on duty, the 24-year-old Bolimir Korobetsk, was crushed by falling masonry as he sought to protect the Banner itself from desecration.
As has been long tradition in Vaestic states, the mokykla and its associated banner-shrine have been the location of periodic debates which have determined the direction of the Lutoborian state and the enthronement of the country’s vozhdey. The most recent instance of the latter – the enthronement of the current vozhd Vladibor XII which brought to a formal end the Confection of 1988 – was the largest and most elaborate of these in modern times, with an assembly of over two thousand people within the walls of the Mokykla, and the entire event being broadcast over national television in what was at that time the largest outside broadcast in the network’s history.
While the Mokykla retains the physical custody of the Banner, protocol surrounding its presence at affairs of state – including occasions when it is relocated to the capital at Hremel for state ceremonials – is the joint responsibility of the Mokykla and the Office of the Standard-Lieutenant, a dedicated division of the Lutoborian government. A round-the-clock guard is maintained on the Banner by troops of the 1st Banner-Shrine Guards’ Regiment, which is based in Zhytomir.