Hetmanskyi

Hetmanskyi is a river park in the oldest sense: 23,360 hectares strung along the Vorskla through Sumy Oblast, declared in April 2009 and running from near the Russian border down past Okhtyrka and Trostianets to Kuzemyn on the Poltava boundary. The name is the geography — the Vorskla was roughly the seam between the Cossack Hetmanate on the right bank and Sloboda Ukraine on the left, so this valley was the Hetmanate's eastern edge. What the park protects is the full anatomy of a forest-steppe river: the winding channel itself, floodplain meadows and marsh, sandy terraces under pine, and the high right-bank bluff under oak.

The oaks are the signature. In tracts like Lytovskyi Bir, one of the pre-existing reserves folded into the park, individual trees stand at three hundred years and more — survivors from when the valley's forests were regimental property. The inventory runs past a thousand plant species and some two and a half thousand animals; the park's emblem is the grey crane, which still breeds in the floodplain bogs, with otters in the oxbows and Mnemosyne butterflies in the open oakwood.

The human layer is dense. Okhtyrka was a Sloboda Cossack regimental town from the 1650s; Trostianets grew rich on the Koenig sugar fortune, and its Neskuchne park — with the 1809 Grotto of Nymphs — borders the park's forests; Tchaikovsky spent the summer of 1864 there and wrote his first orchestral score under these pines. At the far southern end, near Kuzemyn, the outer ramparts of the immense Scythian-era Bilsk hillfort come down to the Vorskla — earthworks on a scale that has tempted archaeologists to call it Herodotus's Gelonus.

Then February 2022. A park that starts at the Russian border was shelled from the first days; Trostianets was occupied for a month, and the fight to liberate it in late March ran straight through the Krasnotrostianets forest tracts, scarring the stands with shrapnel and tracked vehicles. In August 2022 incendiary shelling burned over seven hectares of pine outright. Since liberation the work has been demining, damage survey, and replanting — parts of the park remain closed, and the staff have become as practiced at documenting war losses as at counting cranes.

What's worth knowing before you go

Okhtyrka is the natural base, with Trostianets — on the railway from Kharkiv and Sumy — the other gateway; the park office can say which tracts are currently open, and that question is not a formality here. Demining continues, and the northern reaches toward the border remain off the table; keep to marked routes and the southern half of the valley.

Late spring is the season — the Vorskla floods and settles, the meadows come up, the cranes are loud — and early autumn colours the oak bluffs. The connoisseur's detour is at the park's southern tip: from Kuzemyn you can walk onto the Bilsk ramparts, where a Cossack-era river border runs across an Iron Age one, and the Vorskla below has outlasted both.