Sofiyivka Park

Count Potocki commissioned it in 1796 as a gift to his wife Sofia, and the park still reads as the love letter intended: Sofiyivka's ravine landscape channels streams through grottoes and over cascades, opens onto lakes where swans convoy past classical pavilions, and stages its set pieces - the underground river Styx boated by gondola, the great waterfall, statue-lined avenues - with romantic-era theatre intact. Now a national dendrological park, its tree collection deepens the composition each autumn, and generations of visitors have kept the tradition of arriving as couples, which the garden was always for.

Background

Count Stanisław Szczęsny Potocki founded this English landscape garden in 1796, at an estimated cost of 15 million złoty. It occupies 1.79 km² in the northern part of Uman, near the Kamianka River. Its water features include an Upper pond of 8 ha and a Lower pond of 1.5 ha, waterfalls up to 14m tall and an underground river 224m long. The main entrance towers date from 1850-1852. Over 2,000 kinds of trees and shrubs grow here, among them marsh cypress, Weymouth pine, tulip tree, platanus and ginkgo. Now run as a research institute under Ukraine's National Academy of Sciences, it has been on Ukraine's Tentative List of World Heritage Sites since 2000 and draws 300,000 visitors a year.

Source: Wikipedia, "Sofiyivka Park"

The main sights

• The underground Styx - the gondola passage beneath the park.
• The grand cascade - the ravine's engineered thunder.
• The lakes and follies - swans, pavilions and statue avenues.
• The autumn collection - the dendrological blaze in October.

When to go

May for blossom and fountains, October for the colour turn; summer weekends run busiest.

Things to know

Within the park: distances are real (the full circuit is kilometres), boat queues peak midday, and the romance survives both facts comfortably.

Nearby

Uman's town and the Kyiv-Odesa road's midpoint geography.

Key facts