An ideal spot for a castle
Trip Start
Apr 08, 2007
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112
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Trip End
Oct 01, 2007
Kamyanets-Podilsky,
Ukraine
Sunday, August 19, 2007
That said, it's a lovely destination to visit for the day. The geography of it is simply stunning, even when it is grey and rainy. Arriving at the grotty bus station isn't an especially great welcome, but it doesn't take long to get down and see what all the talk is about. The old town sits propped up on a plateau that rises abruptly out of a deep, heavily-forested gorge. Carved out ages ago by the Smotrych river, the gorge then winds all the way around the historic center, dividing it from another plateau that juts up just across the way. The latter was chosen as the site of the settlement's castle, and it doesn't take a second to realize why. Though it's now connected to the old town by a shoddy, but rather busy road, in former times the castle would have been almost completely protected by the geography and thus practically impenetrable.
Unfortunately, the place was heavily bombed in World War II and they still haven't picked up the pieces. There's a lot of construction going on now in an attempt to bring back the historic center, but even still there's precious little to see and do in the old town. A few distinctively Polish-looking churches dot the center here and there, along with a town hall that could well be in Krakow. Other than that, the place seems a little downtrodden and barren. The castle, however, is an incredible sight to see, and it pops up out of nowhere as you round a corner on the road descending out of the town center. Some genius has built a cafe right at the edge of the gorge overlooking the castle, which would be a brilliant place to dine were not for the terribly inappropriate dance music blasting out of it. Europeans and their cheesy electronica.
I caught a bus out at 7:50 this morning and ended up running into the same German couple I had dinner and visited the university in Chernivtsi with yesterday! So instead of striking out to see everything alone, I did the sightseeing at a more leisurely pace along with them. Having someone to talk to throughout makes for a nice switch (and lunch at a restaurant is much less awkward when you dine as a group). We did have to duck into a museum in the town hall during a particularly intense bout of rain, but other than that the weather wasn't so awful as to make for miserable sightseeing. The museum itself was rather odd - supposedly a museum on the city's history, but dominated by displays on currency, from pre-Roman to modern times. Then we got escorted down to the town hall cellar where they had displays of lifesize human models in various states of torture! All accompanied by a slide show of drawn torture depictions and a soundtrack of human screams! Um . . . nice. Somehow I think they'd be better off using it for storing wine.
Like I said though, I'm glad I just did it as a daytrip. While it's an extremely picturesque and fascinating place, Kamyanets-Podilsky seems pretty dead when it comes to places to eat and drink after seeing the sights. Chernivtsi's definitely got more of the action, so the three of us were happy to return there for the night afterwards. Since it's only at most two hours in either direction, it didn't tire any of us to just head out there for the day and come back.
It did eat up most of the day though, so I wasn't able to hit the nearby castle town of Khotyn. As a result, I'll be staying one more night in Chernivtsi and heading there in the morrow. We'll see how the two castles compare.
