Ukraine!

Francis Tapon has a good book called the Hidden Europe, which is mostly about the countries in Eastern Europe–their culture, their history, their language– but there is a little bit about hiking as well.  It is a little bit out of date, because it was written before the Crimean takeover by Russia.  His website http://www.francistapon.com may have some info for you, and he can be contacted by email, and there’s also a forum.

I don’t have first hand experience with the outdoor scene in Ukraine (I am originally from a way up north). Got a handful of friends from Ukraine though. Based on this, the outdoor culture is pretty much the same as the rest of exUSSR, which is to say it is present very much. Not sure how far you’d get w/o the language, but these days it should be improving. Then check around colleges and universities. Most should have hiking clubs, mountaineering clubs, climbing, etc. For maps, it seems OpenHikingMap/OpenCyclingMap (Gaia/Caltopo) has the best maps. Based on what my friends in exUSSR are using now, it seems like the gear is pretty much the same, Jetboils, MSR Reactors, etc.

I did enquire about this at one stage for several Eastern European countries. I was told that when all those countries were behind the Iron Curtain, travel outside one’s country (let alone outside the USSR) was more difficult. So the ‘authorities’ encouraged walking in the mountains instead.

On the other hand, they did not publish lots of topo maps, for reasons of military security (satellite photography was apparently unknown to them), but local towns often had sketch maps of the local walking tracks. This may be why they are suggesting having a guide or going on a tour. Whether this applies to the Ukraine – I do not know.

Footnote re maps: while I could not get topos for many of those countries from within those countries, I could often get them from American publishers. A spin-off from those US military satellites I gather. Shades of James Bond reading the Russian-language version of the instruction manual for a top-secret American jetpack.

Cheers

Roger, having thought about this a bit, I can’t tell whether outdoor recreation was seriously officially encouraged in the eastern block. I guess you can say so to some degree, since it was treated similarly to other organized sports, with even annual “championships”, based on trip reports. Yet, there were many more people participating in the outdoors than the official support would explain.

Maps. The outdoors people were normally using either old leaked military maps, or copies of these maps, or copies of copies. The hiking and mountaineering clubs around colleges would maintain libraries of maps and trip reports that would get reused. Some of the maps would be hand drawn sketches indeed.

As I had noted, the OpenHikingMap and OpenCyclingMap datasets give very good topo coverage of many places in the world otherwise not covered (Ukraine included). With Google maps for overviews and Gaia/OpenHikingMap on the phone it seems like things are quite reasonable.

Fun fact. Chile and Argentina, being at a state of hostilities, do not publish good maps of Patagonia region. Yet, one of the better maps of the region available on the Internet is the old Soviet military map. If you can read Cyrillic. See, the Soviets had to have maps of the entire world, just in case if the need arises to invade Patagonia one day.

Hi Anton

Snerk! Just so.

Cheers

Ah yes, I do recall the maps being considered state secrets back then.  If nothing better has surfaced since, you can dig through some old maps here:  http://maps.vlasenko.net/

If you prefer Western-made ones, the Perry-Castañeda collection at UT Austin has some small-scale maps (1:500k):  http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/ukraine.html

Awesome!  This is all very helpful!  Thank you!

i am working on Ukrainian language skills, and my boyfriend will be associated with a university in Ivano-Frankivsk, so getting involved with a university club is a great idea!