Our driver was a moustached man with a flat cap who is a dead ringer for Mario, and he was super too. He really looked out for us, informing us on scheduled stops how long we'd be stopping for and pointing us to the toilets when we needed to go. He seemed to know every other passenger boarding the bus, often chatting and chortling with them heartily. It felt like we were in one of those storybook villages where there is only one bus driver, one baker, one policeman, one postman, etc and where everybody knows each other. Like those fictitious storybook villages, the only people of whom there are more than one are the commuters. Unlike our imagined communities, this particular village stretched for 200 odd kilometres between Yaremche and Kamyanets-Podilsky.
Kamyanets-Podilsky translates into English as the Rock of Podillya. It is named after the island of rock created by a loop of the river Smotrych. Today it owes its existence on the tourist trail in Ukraine to a much-photographed fortress built atop the western end of the rock in question. The historical town was once a part of thriving Kyivan Rus. Like many cities and towns in the region, it was sacked by the Mongols in the 1200s and was a part of the usual imperial pass-the-parcel between the Polish-Lithuanian, Ottoman and Russian empires in the following 700 years.
We've not encountered the Mongols and Ottomans on this trip yet, and they, and other nomad polities, form a part of the history of these lands. If Yaremche marks the watershed between Danubia and the steppes, then Kamyanets lies within the marches along the line of the river Dniester. On our journey between Yaremche and Kamyanets, we traversed from west to east the region of Northern Bukovyna and skirted around the northern edges of what used to be known as Bessarabia, names I first heard in a Secondary Four history lesson on the post-war Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. These lands, from the Dniester to the Carpathians further west, are awash with fortresses, built to guard the European approaches from regular easterlies of steppe marauders. (Podillya itself means borderland in Ukrainian.) Mongols and Ottomans are just two groups amongst a host of other horseback warriors such as the Sarmatians, Scythians, Cumans, Pechenegs and Tatars.
We arrived on a glorious afternoon which we hastened to maximize by hurrying to the Old Fortress. With ramparts hugging the edges of the Smotrych canyon, and towers standing tall all around, Kamyanets, whoever held on to it, was considered the strongest fortress in the region. Indeed, its walls have only been breached twice - once by the Lithuanians through treachery, and later by the Ottomans through sheer numbers (reportedly an astonishing sixty to one ratio).
The Old Town east of the Old Fortress looked rather dusty (not an adjective I expected to use in winter) and dilapidated to us. However, boarding and scaffolding on several buildings suggest some sprucing up is under way. Our walk to the Old Fortress and back felt very much like a feral safari. The unexceptional fauna consisted of stray dogs. There is one at every turn. The respectful ones just follow you around, the over-enthusiastic ones literally prance all around you and will paw at you if you aren't firm and the odd xenophobic one barks madly at you. We encountered one such member of the canine far-right, who literally snapped at my heels. Thank God for boots.
Below from top to bottom: the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral at sundown, spruce-up in progress on the Old Town main square, the Armenian Church of St Nicholas, front row seats with views of the Old Fortress across the Turkish Bridge and an angled selfie with the Smotrych Canyon in the background.
Before we left the Old Town we walked into a souvenir shop, which went rather straightforwardly by the name of Ukrainian Souvenirs and was situated on the corner of the main square. The elderly, but rather sprightly, shopkeeper, Mr Yuri Ivanovich, served us wonderfully. Crafts excited us, and his shop was full of those - painted Tatar plates, ornate pisanky (be they hens' or geese' eggs, or wooden) and matryoshka dolls, stuffed Cossack dolls and wooden Hutsul crafts. These he always showed us, gingerly handing them over if they were fragile items or getting out the ladder if they were on the highest shelves.
Below: our museum-shopping experience.
Dinner was at the London Pub, a valiant attempt to implant some eclectic Cockney charm into the steppe, complete with a black and white Tudor timber interior, portraits galore of the Beatles, red telephone boxes, a London double-decker converted into a dessert joint and cardboard stand-ups of Mr Bean and a British bobby (cop). We greeted the tentative service staff when we entered, who played a nervous round of Who's Gonna Serve The Clueless Foreigners. They were quite friendly when they actually approached us later on, albeit without a word of English. I can accept that, it is Ukraine, after all.
Below: night and day views from the Hotel 7 Days of the Old Town.
I must say our accommodation, Hotel 7 Days, is really very centrally located. From where we were it was ten minutes on foot to the Old Town and ten minutes the other way to the bus station. You can get a bird's eye view of the Old Town and the Old Fortress from the higher floors - it's the highest building in the town centre. Members of the staff speak English too, a bonus we've come not to expect outside of Kyiv and Lviv.
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