Kamianets-Podilskyi City Break

“A stone flower on the rock” — that is how the early twentieth-century Ukrainian poet Lesya Ukrayinka called Kamianets-Podilskyi, and this poetic description does fit the image of this old town very well.

It is one of those places for the description of which it is so difficult to find proper words, and one is reduced to making a banal statement of the you’ve-got-to-see-it-to-get-the-right-impression kind. Even looking — another inevitable trite remark — at good-quality, artistic photographs will not produce an impression adequate to the one you get when you walk its streets.

The fortress sits on the pedestal of the rocky island in a tight loop of the River Smotrych which runs through a scenic canyon. It is known that the fortress was founded in the twelfth century and then grew over the centuries into an impregnable stronghold, with new fortifications added and old ones strengthened at each new stage in the development of the art of fortification. Eventually, it has become an architectural marvel, so fittingly described by Lesya Ukaryinka as a stone flower.

There is a fairy-tale quality to Kamianets, an air of the bygone times, a feel of mystery. When you arrive there for the first time, you find yourself in a magic world of curtain walls and mighty towers. The canyon through which the River Smotrych rolls its waters is a perfect setting for this medieval town with its two-thousand-year old Roman bridge, churches, a Gothic city hall. A minaret with the statue of the Virgin on its top, the only such minaret in the world, magnifies the fairy-tale effect.

Join us for the 3 day trip to unique Ukrainain city of Kamianets.