Top Ten Reasons to Travel to Ukraine

Top Ten Reasons to Travel to Ukraine

If you have been following this website, you will have already discovered dozens of reasons to travel to Ukraine. If you are new to our Ukrainian travel community, the writers would like to take an opportunity to offer ten excellent reasons to consider Ukraine as your next tourist destination.

• Over 500 cities in Ukraine were founded more than 900 years ago and nearly 4,500 villages are more than three hundred years old making this country one of the oldest and exciting places to visit in the world. Take a walk through history and discover Ukraine’s past with your contemporary eyes.

• 80 % of the country’s 150,000 cultural, historical and archaeological monuments dating back to the 9th to 11th centuries, the pinnacle of the Kyivan Rus rulers and the time period when Christianity came to the region, are concentrated in Ukraine.

• More than 600 museums introduce travellers to Ukrainian history, art and culture. Check out the Psanky Museum shaped like an Easter egg in Kolomiya or the National Bread Museum in Kyiv for a twist.

• Archaeological excavations abound in Ukraine with magnificent fortresses built by the Italians in the 14th and 15th centuries in Crimea. Ruins are not only excavated but preserved as long as the money holds out. The Golden Gate in central Kyiv is one of Ukraine’s excavation projects still in process.

• If enjoying the outdoors strikes your fancy, Ukraine’s geography is ideal for mountaineering in the Carpathians, diving in Crimea and hiking in one of the country’s 33 national parks, biosphere and nature reserves.

• Reconnect with your spiritual side. Ukraine’s mixed pagan and Christian histories. Odessa’s catacombs and the Lavra Caves in Kyiv pull the curtains back on a monastic history shuttling you to a veiled world of the soul.

• A land of many masters, Ukraine’s glorious battles and tales by fearless Cossack warriors are retold in the ruins of defensive fortresses sprinkled throughout the country.

• Ukrainian hospitality reigns supreme. Guests are welcomed like family into Ukrainians’ homes and treated with an endless supply of food and drink, and of course conversation.

• Festivals, parties, and music. Ukrainians love to celebrate and with nearly a dozen national holidays, a host of religious remembrances and dozens of street and village festivals like Ukraine’s national fair, the Sorochintsy Yarmarok, the International Koktebel Jazz Festival in Crimea and the Hutsul celebration in the Carpathians, travellers experience a festive atmosphere almost from the moment they step off the plane.

• Stand in the past for a moment. For Ukrainians death is not simply a cold and lonely end to life. The dead are merely departed, their memories lovingly preserved in stone. Lviv's Lychakivsky Cemetery is not only exquisite in its 110 acres, but its 3,600 headstones with Soviet fighters interned next to poets and royalty are like a history book made of stone.

Ukraine offers so much for travellers no matter what their interests. This is just a small sampling of sights and sounds. Why not make your own travel itinerary?