Homilshanski lisy
Upland oak forest over the Siverskyi Donets at Zmiiv — a 1914 university biostation, a Cossack monastery above the river, and wartime Kharkiv's breathing space.
Homilshanski lisy — the Homilsha forests — is the classic cross-section of the Siverskyi Donets valley, forty-odd kilometres south of Kharkiv at Zmiiv: 14,315 hectares declared in 2004 around one of the finest surviving upland oakwoods of the left-bank forest-steppe. The right bank rises in a high plateau of oak, ash, and lime cut by ravines; the left bank is sandy terrace under pine; between them the floodplain carries alder carr, willow, oxbow lakes, and Lake Bile, the largest of the park's waters. In a region ploughed nearly wall to wall, this is what the whole Donets country looked like before the plough.
It is also the most-studied forest in eastern Ukraine. In 1914 the botanist Volodymyr Arnoldi picked Haidary, on the park's northern edge, for the first university research biostation in Ukraine, and Kharkiv's Karazin University has run it ever since — generations of the country's biologists did their first fieldwork in these woods. The numbers they compiled: around a thousand vascular plants, some hundred and thirty bird species with white-tailed eagle among the raptors, ten species of bat in the old hollow oaks.
The deep past is thick on the ground. The Velyka Homilsha hillfort with its kurgan cemetery is Scythian-era; Sukha Homilsha holds an eighth-to-tenth-century fortified complex of the Saltiv culture; and above the river at Koropove, Zaporizhian Cossacks founded the St Nicholas monastery in 1648, at the very start of Khmelnytskyi's uprising. Catherine II dissolved it in 1788 along with the rest of Cossack autonomy; it has been revived, and the wooded height beside it is still called Kozacha hora — Cossack hill.
Since 2022 the park has played an unplanned role. The front stopped well short of Zmiiv, though missiles did not, and the district has buried its share of the war; but the forests stayed in Ukrainian hands, the biostation kept working, and for a battered Kharkiv this valley became the nearest place where the war could be put down for a day — tents on the terraces, swimmers in the Donets, quiet under oaks that have seen worse centuries.
What's worth knowing before you go
Zmiiv is the gateway, an easy run from Kharkiv by suburban train, with local buses onward to Koropove, Haidary, and Zadonetske on the left bank. Wartime rules apply: carry the air-alert app, expect some tracts and the odd shoreline to be restricted, and ask at the park administration in Zmiiv before planning anything ambitious.
May is the moment — the oak canopy closing, the floodplain still bright with water — and the first half of autumn is nearly as good. The connoisseur's hour is evening on Kozacha hora above Koropove: the great bend of the Donets below, pine terraces beyond, and the monastery bells across the water, the whole park in one view.