Slobozhanskyi

Slobozhanskyi is the smallest of the Kharkiv region's parks and the strangest: 5,244 hectares on the Merla, a Vorskla tributary, at Krasnokutsk, declared in December 2009. It comes in two unequal halves. On the right bank, an upland oakwood of the usual forest-steppe kind; on the left, a sandy terrace under old pine — and hidden in the hollows between the dunes, sphagnum bogs. Quaking moss carpets, sundew, bog vegetation that belongs five hundred kilometres north — a scatter of boreal islands stranded in the steppe zone since the ice age, and one of the reasons this modest river valley was worth a national park.

The bogs are the treasure and they are studied accordingly: a dozen Red Book plants, nine plant communities in Ukraine's Green Book, and a beaver population that Kharkiv zoologists have monitored since the early 2000s, alongside otter, badger, and grey crane in the wet alder woods. Between the two banks the Merla itself loops through meadow and oxbow down to its meeting with the Merchyk. The pine terrace above is walking country; the bogs themselves are fragile and are properly seen with park staff, from their edges.

The human name is the point too — Slobozhanshchyna, Sloboda Ukraine, the land settled in the seventeenth century by Cossacks and peasants fleeing the wars on the right bank of the Dnipro, invited by Moscow to hold the steppe frontier in exchange for freedoms (slobody) from tax. Krasnokutsk was founded in 1651 as one of their sotnia towns. The later layers are just as good: on the town's edge, the arboretum begun by the Karazin family in the 1790s is one of the oldest acclimatization gardens in Ukraine, and at Volodymyrivka the sugar magnate Pavlo Kharytonenko built the Natalivka estate — a pine park with outbuildings and Oleksiy Shchusev's Church of the Saviour (1911–13), a deliberately archaic masterpiece with carving by Serhii Konenkov, built to house the owner's collection of medieval icons.

What's worth knowing before you go

Krasnokutsk is the gateway, a couple of hours from Kharkiv by bus, and the park office in town is the essential first stop — bog excursions go with a guide, and in wartime the office also knows which tracts are open, since the district sat within artillery range in the first year of the full-scale invasion and access has varied with the situation.

Late May and June are best for the bogs and the meadow flora; autumn gives the pine terrace its long amber light. The connoisseur's afternoon is not in the park at all but beside it: Natalivka's church standing white among the pines, then the Karazin arboretum — sugar money and Enlightenment botany, the two forces that shaped Slobozhanshchyna after the Cossacks, within a few kilometres of each other.