Synevyr

Synevyr was declared in January 1989, in the last Soviet years, and with some forty-three thousand hectares it is the big park of the Zakarpattia side: the southern slopes of the Gorgany at the headwaters of the Tereblia and Rika rivers, above the town of Mizhhiria. The ridges — Strymba, Negrovets, Kamianka — run to a little over seventeen hundred metres, but the park's fame rests on a piece of water covering barely five hectares: Lake Synevyr, the largest mountain lake in Ukraine, held at 989 metres in a bowl a rockslide sealed across the valley some ten thousand years ago.

The lake earns the attention. It is deep out of all proportion to its size — over twenty metres — and cold and clear enough that the tiny islet in the middle reads as a pupil in an eye, which is exactly what the Hutsuls called it: the Sea Eye. The obligatory legend of Syn and Vyr, the count's daughter and the shepherd whose tears filled the basin, is embodied in a thirteen-metre pair of carved wooden figures from the 1980s at the shore. A boardwalk circles the water, and on a July weekend half of Zakarpattia is on it; the forest silence starts one ridge away.

The park's deeper story is timber. The Tereblia valley was a log-driving economy for two centuries, and on the Chorna Rika the park keeps the Museum of Forest and Rafting, built out over the pond of an old klausura — the log-and-stone splash dam that banked spring water to flush the rafts downriver — with the tools and drowned-man folklore of the bokorash raftsmen inside. The catastrophic flood of November 1998 tore out the original dam and museum; it has since been rebuilt in replica, a working monument to the trade that shaped every valley here. The park's newest institution faces the opposite direction: since 2011 a rehabilitation centre near Synevyrska Poliana — the only one in Ukraine — has taken in some thirty brown bears retired from circuses, cages and roadside menageries, giving them hectares of fenced beech forest in which most of them meet the ground for the first time.

What's worth knowing before you go

Mizhhiria is the gateway, reached by bus from Khust or Mukachevo; from there the road runs up the valley to Synevyrska Poliana and over the pass to the lake, with a park entry fee at the gate. Kolochava, on the Tereblia side, is the best base if you want more than the lake — a village of a dozen small museums, including the house-museum of Ivan Olbracht, the Czech writer who set Nikola Šuhaj the Robber here in the 1930s.

Come on a weekday, and in September if you can — the crowds thin, the beech turns, and the bears are active before their winter torpor; mornings are the time at the centre. The connoisseur's walk is to skip Synevyr's boardwalk for Ozirtse, the "wild lake" under Hropa near Negrovets: a dark little landslide tarn ringed by standing dead spruce, an hour's climb from the road and, most days, entirely yours.