The residents of the village of Vovkiv in Pustomytiv raion – 20 kilometers from Lviv – have launched their own tourist itinerary. Picturesque hills, streams, unique flora, miraculously preserved wooden churches, and even a peasant dinner at the estate-museum commemorating the Ukrainian educators Mykola and Kornylo Ustyianovych are some of the activities available to tourists who want travel throughout the area on light horse-drawn carriages or carts.
THE GUELDER ROSE PARADISE
What is so special about the village of Vovkiv that its residents are encouraging everyone to vacation there? A group of activists decided to make it famous. After all, there is no corner of Ukraine that has not been blessed with beauty and history. The house-museum of the priest Mykola Ustyianovych and his son, the artist Kornylo, has been operating in the village for 20 years. But nowadays there are increasingly fewer numbers of people willing to listen to the guide who, armed with a pointer, leads visitors around the museum, spouting figures and facts about the remote past. Tourists mainly want to have a rest, see something interesting and exotic, and experience life in the countryside.
“I have been working in the museum since it was founded, and I have realized that the museum’s work should have been changed long ago,” Natalia Smoliana explained. The village’s young and educated people got together and created an organization called the Guelder Rose Paradise because groves of guelder rose used to grow here. They decided to create a tourist itinerary that would help boost the village economy. They whipped up interest in the local residents, all of whom submitted ideas.
Right off the bat, a local businessman sponsored the creation of new sanitary zones, i.e., public toilets. A local man offered to drive tourists on his cart, and a group of women volunteered to cook suppers for them. The guides were marshaled to tell stories about the history of the area, including the legend about the Great Bear who sleeps on the branches of the apple trees that grow on the land near the museum.
But without money ideas often remain dreams. “It’s not enough to have an idea. Every aspect has to be worked out. So we developed a detailed Ukrainian-Canadian joint project called the Economic Development of the Village of Vovkiv. We researched every step and received money from Canada’s International Bureau of Education. They put a lot of trust in us and put us in touch with the Western Ukrainian Resource Center. Volunteers from Canada came to teach our people to work in agricultural tourism in a professional way. The Student Bureau at the Institute of Forest Economy developed paths for the tourist itinerary,” Smoliana explained.
INDEPENDENCE DAY MARKED BY THE WHOLE VILLAGE
Vovkiv has 150 households. There is no village association, and people work alone on their homesteads. Some leave the village to work and study in Lviv. The transport connection with the oblast center is bad: it is possible to get on a bus in the morning, but it is almost impossible to leave Lviv for the village in the evening.
Some people leave Lviv to settle here. One of them is Yurii Prots, an electrician. He settled in a traditional village house and quickly began farming. He already has five horses and has sown and harvested six tons of oats. He gave his enthusiastic support to the idea of starting a tourist route and agreed to transport tourists by horse. Last year, the young people put shingles on top of the wooden fence around the 18th-century Church of the Epiphany and repaired the roof on the House of Culture.
Businessman Vasyl Ilnytsky helped build public washrooms on the estate where repairs and restoration work are going on. Besides its standing exhibit, the museum boasts a spacious, restored kitchen complete with a wonderful peasant stove.
The new tourist itinerary has so united the residents of Vovkiv that this year the entire village celebrated the 17th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence at the museum. The community raised some money in advance and set up a big table in the front room of the museum, where everyone celebrated like one big family. Many ideas and dreams about developing the village were aired that night. And they sang like true Ukrainians.
THE BASTIONS OF UKRAINIAN CULTURE
“Our first tourist itinerary started to operate with the assistance of a civic organization called the Women’s and Youth Entrepreneurship Development Agency, which has a lot of experience organizing these kinds of excursions. There is a lot of red tape in any business,” Smoliana noted.
A bus filled with Lviv tourists arrived at the village of Kuhaiv, which is part of the Vovkiv village council. They stopped near the unique wooden Church of the Epiphany founded in 1693.
“Wooden churches are our most precious treasure. They are a symbol of our faith and spirituality, a bastion of Ukrainian culture. Very few of them remain, and Ukrainians themselves are ruining them: they cover them with tin and dismantle the wooden domes, which they replace with metal ones,” said the Lviv graphic artist Bohdan Soroka, who recently published an album of linocuts depicting the wooden churches of western Ukraine. Now he and his family, including grandchildren, are traveling along the new route. At various stops tourists ask Soroka to show them his album.
A group of tourists arrived at the church on a fira, a wide Ukrainian peasant cart. The hilly countryside is dotted with various aromatic herbs. A flock of storks gathered, captivating the youngest tourists in the group: children. The tourists also stopped in the tiny village of Hrabnyk, where hornbeams used to grow and a monastery villa was located. This was the residence of the well-known Czech ethnographer Franciszek Grzegorz, dubbed the “apostle of Slavic unity.” Well-known writers and educators visited him there, including Hnat Khotkevych, Ludwig Kuba, Jan Kasprowicz, and Ivan Franko, who liked to fish in this small village.
A stone commemorating Slavic unity was unveiled in 1991, during an international conference dedicated to Grzegorz. The three-hundred-year-old lime trees that surround Hrabnyk are protected, and sheep graze on the hillside. Potato pancakes with sour cream and golden boiled corn were waiting for the tourists under a huge oak in the felling area.
Afterwards, the tourists continued their ride over the hills and across the Zubra River to the village of Vovkiv. En route they saw an abandoned Roman Catholic church built in the early part of the 20th century, which is frequently used by cinematographers during shoots. In Vovkiv they visited another local wooden church, the Presentation of the Holy Virgin, which was built in the 18th century. Ancient icons decorate this church, where Mykola Ustyianovych served as a priest.
The priest’s house, which houses a museum, is located near the church. A garden, a well, and a flowerbed in the tidy courtyard create a sense of unforgettable charm.
Now an experienced farmer, Prots has also become an enthusiastic horseback-riding instructor. All the tourists, seated on horses, gazed down on the country estate, breathing in the wonderful scents of forest and field wafted by a light wind.
