Sofiyivsky Park

Sofiyivka, on the northern edge of Uman in central Ukraine, is one of the finest surviving landscape parks of the turn of the nineteenth century. It was laid out from 1796 by the Polish magnate Count Stanisław Szczęsny Potocki and named after his Greek-born wife Sofia; tradition has it that the park was his birthday present to her. Today it is the National Dendrological Park "Sofiyivka", a research institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, covering 179.2 hectares. It has been on Ukraine's tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage since 2000, and in 2007 a public and expert vote named it one of the Seven Wonders of Ukraine.

The military engineer Ludwik Metzel turned a rough landscape of ravines along the Kamianka river into a sequence of scenes loosely based on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, with serfs providing most of the labour. Ponds (the Upper Pond alone covers about 8 hectares), sluices, fountains and waterfalls, the tallest some 14 metres high, alternate with granite cliffs, grottoes, pavilions and mostly classical sculpture; an underground channel, named after the mythical river Acheron, runs for 224 metres. After the Polish November Uprising the park was confiscated in 1832, and Tsar Nicholas I gave it to his wife Alexandra Feodorovna. From 1836 to 1859 it belonged to the military settlements administration, which altered it considerably; the towers at the main entrance date from 1850–52.

As a botanical collection the park has grown far beyond Potocki's plantings. A 2007 count of its collections gave more than 3,300 taxa, some 546 of them trees, and visitors will find swamp cypress (Taxodium), Weymouth pine, tulip trees, planes and ginkgo. Uman itself is a modest city with an outsized reputation: it appears in Taras Shevchenko's poem Haidamaky, is a pilgrimage site for Breslov Hasidic Jews, and is a centre of horticultural research with its own university of gardening.

Getting there

The park lies in the north of Uman, about 1.5 km from the centre, with its main entrance on Kyivska Street. The nearest practical international airport is Chișinău (RMO) in Moldova, about 226 km away in a straight line, from which the journey continues overland across the border. Kyiv lies about 190 km to the north.