• IN PRAISE OF UNREMARKABLE TOWNS


    AND DAZZLING SEASCAPES TOO

    Travelling through Ukraine, Jon Fasman finds much to surprise him, from the plain everyday life of his wife's ancestral town of Uman, to the near-Mediterranean landscapes and exotic history of Crimea ...

    from our travel blog, FURTHERMORE

    I'm back from a two-and-a-half week trip through Ukraine. We missed Lviv, unfortunately, but saw the other big-three cities: Kyiv, Odessa and Yalta. All were enjoyable, but, like most tourists, we went knowing what to expect: Kyiv the bustling capital, Odessa the tree-lined and fast-talking port town, and Yalta the glitzy and rather corny beach resort.

    Between our first two stops, however, we spent a couple of days in Uman, an unremarkable agricultural town of about 100,000 in the centre of Ukraine's wheat belt. I went for family reasons--my spouse's great-grandfather emigrated from there two New York--and spent two days scouring graveyards, trying (and failing) to find archival records, or even a phone book, and basking in a lot of curious stares.

    Tourists tend not to go to Uman (tourists tend not to go to Ukraine, but that's another story), and why would they? Its major attractions are Sofiyikva Park, a nature reserve about which Ukrainians tend to get quite breathless but which is about as exciting as a subsection of Central Park or Kew Gardens; and the tomb of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, which draws about 20,000 Hasidic pilgrims--different, of course, from tourists--every Rosh Hashanah.  read more »


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