Uman

I did not expect to be moved by a garden. I came to Uman, three hours south of Kyiv through flat black-earth farmland, mostly because Lia had read a sentence somewhere about a Polish count who built a park as a gift for his wife and then refused to ever say how much it cost. That kind of story is catnip for her. I assumed we would walk around for an hour, eat something, and leave. We stayed until the gates closed.

Sofiyivka, or the Cost of Love

Sofiyivka Park was laid out in the 1790s by Count Stanisław Szczęsny Potocki for his wife Zofia, and the man clearly had a problem with restraint. There are artificial waterfalls fed by hand-dug channels, a subterranean river you float through in a small boat in total darkness, fake grottoes built to look like accidents of geology, and a fountain that shoots water through the mouth of a bronze serpent using nothing but gravity and two centuries of clever Greek engineering. None of it is natural. All of it pretends to be. I found that honesty about its own artifice oddly touching.

We took the boat through the underground “river Styx,” which is exactly as theatrical as it sounds, and emerged into a pond where the light came back so suddenly that an older Ukrainian woman beside us actually gasped. Lia squeezed my hand. I’m not made of stone.

The Town That Two Worlds Share

Uman is also, improbably, one of the most important pilgrimage sites in the Jewish world. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov is buried here, and every year around Rosh Hashanah tens of thousands of Hasidic pilgrims arrive from Israel, the United States, and beyond, transforming the quiet streets near his tomb into something loud and joyful and entirely unlike the rest of the town. We visited outside the pilgrimage, when the neighborhood was calm, and a man selling religious books told me, in a mix of English and gestures, that the town holds its breath all year for those few weeks.

That layering is what stuck with me. A Catholic count’s romantic folly and a Hasidic holy site, a few kilometers apart, in a town most foreigners couldn’t find on a map. Ukraine keeps doing this — stacking entire civilizations in places that look, from the road, like nowhere in particular.

A Slow Afternoon

We ended the day at a café near the park entrance, eating varenyky with sour cherries and drinking kvas that the owner insisted was the best in the region. It probably wasn’t, but he believed it so completely that arguing felt rude. The light went long and gold across the park’s outer trees, and I understood why Potocki kept the price a secret. Some things you build are not supposed to be measured. You just walk through them, with the person you’d build one for, and let the gates close behind you.

When to go: Late spring and early autumn are ideal — the park is at its most photogenic in May blossom and September gold. If you want to witness the Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage, come in September or October, but book far ahead and expect a transformed town. As always with Ukraine, check current advisories and stay flexible.