Male Polissia

Male Polissia — Small Polissia — is a geographical anomaly before it is a park: a lowland corridor of glacial outwash sand wedged between the Volhynian upland and the hills of Podillia, a hundred kilometres south of where Polissia proper ends. Everything about it belongs to the north — pine forest on sandy terraces, sphagnum bogs, dark humic lakes — stranded in the middle of the forest-steppe like a sample carried south and forgotten. The national park, created by decree in August 2013 over a modest 8,763 hectares in the Iziaslav and Slavuta districts of Khmelnytskyi oblast, protects the best of the Khmelnytskyi share of this corridor: forest blocks and mire in the valleys of the upper Horyn, the Viliia and the Hnylyi Rih.

The park's appeal is the compressed contrast. Within an afternoon's walk you pass from dry pine terrace with reindeer lichen and heather — textbook Polissia — down into fen and bog, then out onto the floodplain meadows of the Horyn, here still a young river gathering itself before its long run north to the Prypiat. The mixing of floras is the botanical point: 21 plant species from the national Red Book, northern bog specialists growing a short distance from steppe-edge species at the limit of their ranges. The best-loved single feature is Sviate lake — "Holy lake" — a small round karst lake in the pines whose clear, cold water has accumulated the legends such lakes always do, along with summer swimmers. The fauna is quietly northern too: crane and black stork in the mires, otter and badger, 186 bird species recorded on a territory you can cross on foot.

The towns around the park carry more history than their size suggests. Iziaslav — old Zaslav — was a seat of the Sanguszko princes, with the ruined palace and monumental Baroque monastery complexes to show for it; Slavuta was another Sanguszko town; and Netishyn, the reactor city of the Khmelnytskyi nuclear plant, supplies the region's oddest skyline, cooling towers rising behind the pine.

What's worth knowing before you go

Iziaslav is the gateway, with the park office and road access into the main forest blocks; Shepetivka, a major rail junction on the Kyiv–Lviv lines, is the practical way in from anywhere far, with local connections onward. This is the least complicated of Ukraine's western parks to visit in wartime — far from the front and nowhere near a border strip, with no access restrictions beyond ordinary common sense.

Seasons run on the forest's clock: May and June for bog cotton and the fens in flower, late July into September for the great Polissia harvest of bilberries and mushrooms, which here is a social event as much as an ecosystem service. Swim Sviate lake in high summer. The connoisseur's habit is to walk a full transect — terrace pine to bog to Horyn meadow — in one go; nowhere else in this atlas does the north-to-south compression of landscapes happen in so few kilometres.