Apple Orchard Viewpoint

The apple trees were planted by the collective farm and then left alone, which is how the best view in Kolochava came to be a lapsed orchard rather than a built platform. A bench, a worn line up through the grass, a couple of dozen old trees still standing at the spacing somebody measured out decades ago. Nobody prunes them. They fruit anyway.

Two proper summits rise within a day's walk of the village, Strymba and Darvaika, and each costs a day. This costs five minutes from the bus stop, and it is the one place you can take in the whole of Kolochava at once.

What you can name from up here

The valley below is the Terebla's, and the panorama is a wide, undramatic Verkhovyna one — no cliffs, no exposure, just distance. Kolochava lies along the river as a ribbon of roofs and vegetable plots with the Kolochavka threading through it. Behind the village the ridges run spruce to about 1,300–1,400 m and grass above that, where cattle go out for the summer.

Two features are worth picking out. Mt Strymba closes the view at 1,719 m: a triangular summit of the Gorgany kind, mountain pine and stone fields on its crown, and the last real peak of that range. To the north the long back of polonyna Krasna shuts the valley off. Kolochava itself sits at 631 m, so what you are reading is roughly a kilometre of vertical between the gardens under your feet and the skyline.

Eight villages in one

At ground level Kolochava is a road you drive along for a quarter of an hour. From the orchard you can see why. The settlement runs about 15 km end to end, and it did not grow that way — eight separate hamlets, Bradolets, Hersovets, Stare Selo, Zaverkh, Zatin, Kalnovets, Potochok and Suhar, were merged into it in 1967. What looks like randomly scattered housing from the road resolves from up here into clusters with fields between them. It also explains why walking between the museums takes longer than the map suggests.

When to come up

Early. In summer the sun comes up from behind Strymba at around five, and Kolochava under morning mist is the version of this view people come back for — the cloud settles into the valley and the ridges float on top of it. Failing that, the last hour before sunset, when the light arrives sideways and every fold in the hills separates out.

Autumn is the strongest season for colour, when the beech turns and the slopes go yellow and red against the spruce. May gives you the orchard in blossom, September the apples. Late March and April are the crocus weeks, and the meadows below the skansen pull photographers from across the country.

Finding it, and what to bring

The way up starts at the migrant workers' monument by the bus stop. Walk left towards the small war museum with a tank on its roof, then take the slope opposite; five minutes of climbing brings you into the orchard, and going a little higher widens the panorama further.

The path is dirt and turns slippery after rain, so wear a sole with some grip. The hill is open ground, so a warm afternoon in the village can be a cold, windy evening up here — take a layer you can put on. Carry cash while you are at it: this is a mountain village and not everywhere takes a card.