In year 2000 guitarist Roman Pratsjovytyj and bassist Andrij "Little John" Kindratovych formed a band to play doom-metal. The band was titled "Irij". (Irij is something like Garden of Eden in Slavic heathen mythology, as far as I know.) After few months vocalist Ksenia Rykhalska and solo-guitarist Vasyl Shevchuk joined the band. In November 2000 drummer Andrij Kopylchak and keyboard player Hryhorij Ihnatovych joined in, which made the band fully complete.

After long searching for a place for rehearsals and around 3 months of rehearsing, at 18-th of February 2001 Irij for the first time played live on a stage of a local club "Lialka" (Lviv city). (There had been made some rehearsal recordings somewhere around that time or earlier, but their quality is quite poor and material itself doesn't deserve much attention when compared to band's official demo recording "Legenda".)

In spring of year 2001 Irij became a member of Lviv rock-club "Fira", and records a demo entitled "Legenda" - a beautiful work of art, which later became available for download in World Wide Web and received very positive response in Ukrainian metal underground.

During 2002 Irij played live around 20 times in Lviv and neighboring cities. In summer 2002 keyboard player Hryhorij Ihnatovych left the band, and in autumn 2002 drummer Andrij Kopylchak left Irij to join death metal band Ambivalence. For around a year band was looking for a drummer, and finally in October 2003 Nazarij "Lars" Samotis joined the band as a drummer.

Irij plays live again, but, unfortunately, without keyboardist. Later, in February (or in January, I don't know the exact date) 2005 Andrij Kindratovych and one of guitarists (no information which one yet) had left Irij . Andrij Kindratovych formed his own band Polynove Pole ("Wormwood Field"), which now has complete line-up and plays live in Lviv. Two new members (unfortunately, I have no information about them) joined Irij, and band rehearses again. For a long time band members think about recording a full-length album, but nothing happened yet. Well, I hope they will manage to record it in near future, and it would be even better than Legenda.