Dzhuryn Falls

The tallest waterfall on Ukraine's plains — 16m over three cascades, spreading to about 20m wide — was almost certainly put there by people who wanted a mill. Nothing on the ground gives that away: the Dzhuryn arrives out of a wooded ravine, drops in broad stepped sheets loud enough to hear from the track above, and hides a grotto behind the top curtain of water.

That origin is the reason to come here rather than to the Carpathian falls two hours west. Dzhuryn is taller than Shypit and twice the height of Probiy, it stands in Podillian farmland instead of mountains, and it comes with the ruins of a town that no longer legally exists.

Made, not found

Three explanations circulate locally. The first has an Ottoman army cutting through the rock ridge during the siege of 1672 to pull the Dzhuryn out of the loop that shielded Chervonohorod castle. The second credits the Ponińskis, who were converting that castle into a palace in the early 19th century and, the story goes, moved the water to give their park a waterfall.

Both run into the same document. The von Mieg survey of 1779–1782 already shows the loop around the castle intact and a waterfall with a mill beside it — too early for the Ponińskis, and no besieging army digs a millrace. That leaves the least romantic version as the likeliest: villagers split part of the flow into a new channel to drive a watermill in a district that had none. A mill at Chervonohorod appears in a geographical dictionary in 1880, and one worked here into the early 1950s; a small hydroelectric station replaced it and ran until the reservoir silted up in the 1960s.

The town that was struck off the map

Chervonohorod held Magdeburg rights from 1448 and was the seat of a starostwo for three centuries. What you pass on the way down is what came after: in 1820 Karol Poniński pulled down half the castle and raised a palace on its foundations, and his son, finding the surviving towers too squat, replaced them with taller pseudo-Gothic ones. Those two towers still stand, with fragments of the church.

The town emptied after the Second World War. Its Polish inhabitants were deported to Poland, an attempt to resettle families displaced from Lemkivshchyna did not hold, and by 1952 six households with fifteen residents remained. In 1970 the settlement was struck from the register. The name survives in the ravine — the Chervone, or ‘red’, tract, after earth and stone stained by iron compounds; after rain the puddles run the colour of weak wine.

Standing under it

The protected site covers 0.7ha and has been a hydrological natural monument since 1972. The fall is wide rather than narrow — three broad steps, not a single plume — and the basin beneath is shallow enough that people swim in it all summer. Getting behind the top cascade, into the grotto with the water closing in front of you, is half the reason anybody comes.

On an August weekend it is busy: this is the swimming hole for the surrounding villages as much as a sight for visitors. Come early on a weekday, and come early anyway, because of the walk back.

Getting there, and the climb back

Nyrkiv is the reference point; the falls lie southwest of it, near Ustechko in Chortkiv district. On public transport, route via Zalishchyky — coaches run there from Lviv, then a local bus. Driving from Lviv, the line is Ternopil, Terebovlia, Zalishchyky, then the turn for Nyrkiv.

Do not drive down to the water. The approach is steep and twisting; leave the car in one of the roadside parking areas, where a charge is usually collected, and walk in past the Poniński chapel and the castle ruins. Reckon 2.5km and forty minutes down a track that turns slippery after rain and has almost no shade, then the same distance back up in full sun — the part that catches people out. Carry water. You hear the falls long before you see them.

The rest of the ravine

A kilometre and a half south of Nyrkiv, inside Dnister Canyon National Nature Park, is the Pustelnia tract: a travertine grotto above the river, the Hermit's Cave, where a monk is said to have lived in the 19th century and where a stone figure he carved is reported to survive. Beside it the Divochi Slozy — Maiden's Tears — comes off the rock in threads fed by a spring.

The Dnister canyon is minutes away and Rakovets castle an easy drive. In warm weather you can pitch a tent in the hollow below the falls, and ethno-festivals turn up through the summer. Take your rubbish out; the site is small, and neglect shows on it fast.