Do I wake or sleep?

I'm watching a documentary right now about Byzantium (oddly, earlier today I was watching the first 30 minutes of Midnight Express). There's a strong strain of Byzantine culture in Russia (which is still going strong today--Russia's Orthodox lean is one example), so the documentary deals with that as well. One thing that makes me wonder is seeing the grandeur and scale of these old, old buildings. The things that determine what makes a "good" building (engineering, geometry, scale, etc.) had all been figured out by the people over a thousand years ago--by medical and technological standards, these people are primitive, but by architectural standards they were, essentially, our peers. They left buildings and structures that are still standing, still utilitarian. And when you see the pictures of how some of the buildings originally looked, the palaces and churches--they were amazing. Shining, glorious, gilded towers and spires reaching up to the heavens. Where did these people get the inspiration? Kiev was a frozen wasteland back then--how the hell did these people take time off from fighting the weather, from surviving, to create these glorious churches and icons?