Nizhyn

Nizhyn cucumbers have been a byword in Ukraine and beyond for two centuries, pickled with dill, horseradish, garlic and blackcurrant leaf, and the town has a monument to them. Its other history is trade: a Greek merchant colony settled here in the seventeenth century and built its own churches, and the Nizhyn Lyceum, founded in 1820, taught Gogol among others and stands as a long neoclassical block with a colonnade, still in use as a university and still the largest building in the town.

What you actually see

• The cucumber monument - a bronze cucumber on a barrel, the town's emblem.
• The lyceum - the 1820 neoclassical college where Gogol studied.
• The Greek churches - buildings of the seventeenth-century merchant colony.
• The market - where the pickles are actually sold, in season.

When to go

April to October is the comfortable season. Cucumber season runs through the summer and the market is best then. Museums close on Mondays.

Honest expectations

Much of what is sold as Nizhyn pickle is made elsewhere; the variety and the method travelled. The town is workaday outside the lyceum quarter. Museums are small.

Nearby

Chernihiv is northwest, and Kyiv is southwest.