Features
Gladiators spar with Greek Gods. A lion creeps through the fall leaves ready to pounce. On a bench an iron coat lies abandoned. And if you whisper at one end of the white colonnade amidst the bare trees, another will hear your secrets 34 meters away. Oleksandriya Park had always been a place of solace and melancholy, joy and relief through the centuries, and this natural Ukrainian hideaway offers travelers an opportunity to quietly walk through a country’s long history in an undisturbed, peaceful environment.
Features
Little girls dream of owning one. Farmers once relied on their burly strength. Soldiers fired bullets from their stolid backs in wars past. The horse, mankind’s honorable equine partner and friend has evolved in both purpose and breeding through the centuries. Indeed, horse breeding itself, a tradition for over 6,000 years, is as much an art form as a scientific experiment. In the case of Ukrainian horse aficionados, the wedding of both approaches has proven successful.
Features
A Ukrainian proverb suggests that coffee should be dark as night and sweet like a woman, and while Starbucks tempts the world’s taste buds with elaborate concoctions of coffee, Ukrainians choose black tea or vodka. Consuming either drink for Ukrainians is as much a daily commitment to conversation as it is to culinary choice.
Features
Deep in the depths of the Zoloti Vorota metro station, today’s harried travelers’ rush through mosaic adorned marble walls and the glow of lit candelabras shine a path on grey granite floors. Centuries ago, however, the epicenter of Kyiv was served by another architectural triumph. The Golden Gates of Kyiv, an impregnable fortress of brick and stone ramparts with a vaulted passageway from which soldiers of the Kyivian Rus kept watch and crowned by a church covered with gilded copper sheets, came to mark the entrance into the ancient city of Kyiv.
Features
Minutes after the sun rises, an insistent knock echoes through a rural Ukrainian house. With heavy eyes and limbs still warm from sleep, a young daughter answers the door to find a crimson clad Devil, a comical faced Gypsy, and a smiling Bear gathered in the winter morning. A fantastical dream fading into early morning? A bizarre prank by the local school children? A team of robbers in costumed disguise? This is not an average winter morning, it is New Year’s Day and the masquerading visitors are characters in the Malanka celebrations.
Features
Coins, maps, and medical instruments may have been the inventive purview of the Greeks. Ancient Romans can certainly lay claim to aqueducts, central heating, and elected government. Yet, Ukrainians have their own history of recorded inventions, too. Why not take a moment to peruse a sampling of the ancient discoveries of Ukraine?
Features
Bread itself is an object of reverence and hospitality in Ukraine. Recognized for centuries as the “bread basket of Europe” and victimized by Stalin during the Second World War leaving its citizens without grain to make bread, Ukraine’s devotion to bread has found a home in Kyiv’s National Bread Museum. Moving exhibits in the museum demonstrate the magnitude of bread’s meaning.
Features
Venerated for centuries in countries around the world, the visage of St. Michael, the Archangel of the heavens and the warrior purported to pass judgment on all souls when Christ returns to an earthly form, this saint, Ukrainians claim as their own alone.
