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What to see on holiday in Ukraine

Olyanna Travel offers holidays in Ukraine; a vast and beautiful country that will surprise and engage the visitor from the UK.

Ukraine's fascinating history has many links with the UK.

During the 1945 Yalta Conference Winston Churchill stayed at the fantastical palace of Prince Michael Vorontsov, an Anglophile who had created a unique architectural pot-pourri of Scottish baronial, neo-Gothic and Moorish Arabesque. After the depredations of Stalin on the local Tatars Churchill called Yalta the 'Riviera of Hades'.

The famous steps in Odessa are associated with the emigre English engineer Upton, who built the highway from Telford to Holyhead. Upton was convicted of fraud in the UK but jumped bail and escaped to Russia where he became the chief engineer at Sevastopol and built many of the forts that cost the lives of the British soldiers in the Crimean War

In industrial Eastern Ukraine, Donetsk was originally named Yuzovka after John Hughes, a Welshman. In the 19th century he, with a team of British technicians, Russian and Ukrainian workers helped to plan and erect a vast industrial complex. It was here that the young Nikita Krushchev began working as a metal worker.

But an older and extraordinary association is with an intrepid traveller from the UK, Mary Holderness, who took the route from Riga down to Crimea via Kiev publishing her account in 1823. Ukraine has of course changed much in the intervening period but there will be many places that remain as they have always been.

A good place to start is a short break in Kiev. What an exceptional city - how different from any European City. If you extend your stay by a day or two there are some fascinating places just a day trip away - where you really feel immersed in the special culture of Ukraine - an unmistakeable part of the old Soviet Union with a tumultuous recent history.

But with the hot Summers in Ukraine perhaps a trip South to the Black Sea would be tempting either to the Tatar homeland of Crimea or the cosmopolitan Odessa where Isaac Babel set his stories about Beny Krik king of the underworld and where Anna Akhmatova the greatest Russian poet (after Pushkin)was born.