Sviati Hory

The Holy Mountains are chalk: white Cretaceous cliffs standing a hundred metres over a bend of the Siverskyi Donets, the great river of the Ukrainian east, with pine and oak forest rolling back from both banks. The national park, declared in 1997 across 40,609 hectares of the Donets valley, protects the strangest of those pines — the chalk pine, a pre-glacial relict that grows on bare carbonate where ordinary Scots pine gives up — along with oakwoods, floodplain lakes and one of the densest concentrations of protected species in the Donbas. In 2008 the chalk cliffs were voted one of the seven natural wonders of Ukraine.

In the tallest cliff sit the caves of the Sviatohirsk Lavra. Monks were cutting cells into the chalk long before the first written record of the Holy Mountains in 1526; the monastery was dissolved under Catherine II in 1787, revived in 1844, turned into a Soviet sanatorium after 1922, and refounded in 1992, receiving the exalted status of lavra in 2004. On the neighbouring summit stands its improbable secular twin — Ivan Kavaleridze's 1927 concrete colossus of the Bolshevik Artem, twenty-seven metres of cubist geometry glaring down the valley.

In 2022 the front line ran straight through all of this. Through the spring the Donets was the line itself; the lavra, sheltering hundreds of refugees, was shelled repeatedly, monks and civilians were killed, and on 4 June the wooden All Saints skete — the monastery's loveliest building — burned to the ground. Sviatohirsk fell in June and was liberated on 12 September 2022. The forests fared worst of all: by the following winter some seventy per cent of the park's pine stands, more than five thousand hectares, had burned in the fighting, and an estimated four-fifths of the territory remains damaged, mined, or both.

What happens next makes Sviati Hory one of the most closely watched recovery stories in European conservation. Deminers work the forest tracts hectare by hectare; ecologists argue, productively, over whether to replant the burned plantations with pine or let native broadleaf forest take the ground back; the lavra holds services again below its scarred cliff, and the Artem statue, chipped by shrapnel, still stands.

What's worth knowing before you go

Sviatohirsk is under Ukrainian control, and pilgrims and day visitors have begun returning to the town and the lavra — but this is a frontline-adjacent place, and the rules are unlike anywhere else in this atlas. The forests are mined: leaving paved roads and explicitly cleared areas is genuinely dangerous and will stay so for years. Much of the park is closed outright, and the security situation shifts with the front to the east — check the current status before considering any trip, and treat the town, the monastery and the riverside as the full extent of what can responsibly be seen.