Maniava

The finest thing ever made in Maniava is not here any more. Between 1699 and 1705 the monk Yov Kondzelevych and his workshop painted an iconostasis for the skete's Holy Cross church; when the Austrians dissolved the monastery in 1785 it was carted down to the parish church at Bohorodchany, which is why art historians call it the Bohorodchany iconostasis; in 1916 Austrian officials took it apart and shipped it to Vienna; in 1924 Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky bought it back for the National Museum in Lviv, where it has hung ever since.

What Maniava kept is the valley that produced it. The monastery stands a short way above the village in a fold of the Gorgany foothills, and the village itself — 3,412 people, 519 m up, 49 km from Ivano-Frankivsk — turns out to be older than the monks: a royal survey of 1565 records salt being got here. Everything worth walking to lies within a morning of everything else, which is why a few hundred visitors a day can arrive in season without the place feeling crowded.

Why they called it the Carpathian Athos

Yov Kniahynytsky came from Tysmenytsia and spent twelve years on Mount Athos before news of the Union of Brest brought him home. He put up the first cell at Maniava in 1611 and the first wooden church a year later, and imposed the rule of St Basil the Great in its strictest form — which is what earned the house its second name, not any resemblance of the landscape to Greece. In 1620 the Patriarch of Constantinople granted it stauropegial status, lifting it clear of the local bishop; at its height it held two hundred monks and governed dozens of smaller houses across Galicia, Bukovyna and Moldavia.

It was also a fort. Stone walls with three loopholed towers went up from 1621, and villagers sheltered behind them during Tatar and Ottoman raids until the Turks broke through in 1676; the place was rebuilt in 1681 and closed, as the monks then thought for good, by Joseph II's dissolution in 1785. Monks came back on 28 May 1998, and Maniava Skete now belongs to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Tradition holds that Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky lies buried inside the walls; digging in the 1930s turned up nothing, and the story has outlived the search.

Two walks from the same road

A kilometre from the monastery, in thick forest, sits Blazhennyi Kamin — the Blessed Stone — a slab roughly ten metres by three with a grotto beneath it and a spring running out from under the rock. The grotto was the first shelter and the first chapel here, the cave the monastery grew out of. The water has been treated as curative for four centuries: people say it helps the eyes, and that the spring dried up when the monastery was closed and ran again when it reopened.

The other walk goes the opposite way, up the Manyavka to Maniava Falls: twenty metres of water into a gorge some two hundred metres long, walls rising as high as the fall itself, and a cold pool at the bottom that people swim in on hot days. It is protected as a hydrological monument of national significance. Reckon on five kilometres each way, waymarked blue on white, with the stream to be forded several times — wear boots you don't mind soaking, and don't attempt it in shoes after rain.

Three hundred years of larch, and a room about bears

The forest around the monastery has been a reserve of national significance since 1982, 362 hectares of it, and the reason is a single hectare inside: a stand of Polish larch three centuries old, individual trees running to thirty-five and forty metres. It is one of the oldest deliberate plantings in the Ukrainian Carpathians and still used as a seed source. Walking the reserve you may put up roe deer, red deer, wild boar or a pine marten.

The village council building in the centre houses a Bear Museum, which sounds like a curiosity and is in fact a small conservation project — brown bears in Ukraine live almost entirely in these mountains, and the count was around two hundred animals in 2005. It takes twenty minutes and children like it. The 1819 Protection church is the other thing in the village proper worth a stop.

Arriving, and going further in

A car is the sensible way. From Ivano-Frankivsk the road runs through Bohorodchany and Solotvyn, then holds the main line into the village until the turning for the skete. Buses do run from the Ivano-Frankivsk bus station, and the nearest railway station is Nadvirna, from which you finish by local transport or taxi — but with either you should expect to walk the last part to the falls whatever you arrive in.

Maniava itself is a village, not a resort, so beds are few. Most people stay in the surrounding Bohorodchany settlements or nearer Ivano-Frankivsk, where the range runs from farmhouse rooms to complexes with pools, and give Maniava a full day from there. For walkers it is a genuine gateway rather than a destination: the trails from here lead into the wildest part of the Gorgany, and Velyka Syvulia, the range's high point at 1,836 m, is reachable on a multi-day route with the neighbouring villages as staging posts. Come in autumn if you can choose — the larch turns, the crowds thin, and the falls still have water in them.