Vinnytsia

Vinnytsia's tram tracks are set a metre apart. So are Zurich's, and that is the whole reason a provincial Ukrainian city runs Swiss rolling stock: rather than scrap its retired cars, Zurich has been shipping them here since 2007 — Karpfen and Mirage sets first, then 35 low-floor Tram 2000s.

About 372,000 people live on the two banks of the Pivdennyi Buh here, in eastern Podillia, and for years residents have rated their own city services higher than anyone else in Ukraine rates theirs, in the annual municipal survey run for the International Republican Institute. A dull-sounding reason to visit. What it buys you is a nineteenth-century core you can cross in twenty minutes, transport that takes a bank card and nothing else, and three sights — an embalmed surgeon, a fountain moored in the river, the wreckage of Hitler's eastern headquarters — with no business being in the same town.

An afternoon on Soborna

The centre is arranged around one red-brick tower at vul. Mykoly Ovodova 20. Hryhorii Artynov put it up in 1911 to carry the head of the city's first water main and double as a fire watch: 28 metres of shaft, a viewing gallery at 30, 41 to the top. Inside it now is the Museum of Memory for soldiers of the Vinnytsia region killed in the war — the prettiest building in town, with the heaviest contents.

From Yevropeiska Ploshcha at its foot, vul. Soborna runs past the Mury: the walls of a Jesuit monastery begun in the 1630s, the only seventeenth-century defensive work left here. Magdeburg rights followed in 1640. Three times between 1918 and 1920 the government of the Ukrainian People's Republic fell back on these streets, the Directorate working out of the Savoy hotel.

The fountain the city switches off

The other emblem sits in the water. The Roshen fountain stands on a floating platform 95 metres long, moored off the embankment opposite Kempa island, and pushes river water through 277 nozzles — 60 metres up at the centre, some 140 across the front. It opened in September 2011 and is the largest floating fountain in Europe. The season starts on 1 May, with a show every half hour through the evening; the lasers that used to play across the spray have not returned since 2022, and the whole thing stops the moment an alert sounds.

A surgeon in an orchard, a bunker in the pines

Mykola Pyrohov bought the Vyshnia estate on the southern edge of town in 1859 and spent his last two decades there. He had already operated under ether anaesthesia on a battlefield — the first surgeon anywhere to do it, in the Caucasus in 1847 — and worked out how to set a broken bone in plaster. When he died in 1881 his widow had the body embalmed; since 1885 it has lain in a church-necropolis a kilometre and a half from the house, where you can still look at it.

Twelve kilometres north, in pine woods between Stryzhavka and Kolo-Mykhailivka, is what is left of Werwolf. Soviet prisoners of war dug Hitler's eastern headquarters over the winter of 1941–42 — three bunkers, twenty-odd surface buildings, a swimming pool, a cinema — and he worked from it through the summer of 1942 and the drive on Stalingrad. The Germans blew it up themselves in 1944. What is left is broken concrete under trees planted to hide it, with panels explaining the site. Come for the history; there is very little to look at.

Where you sleep, and what Podillia tastes like

Stay inside the block bounded by vul. Soborna, Ovodova, Teatralna and Khlibna and you will not need transport at all. Generators, Starlink and a fitted-out shelter are standard now rather than selling points.

Podillia cooking is plain and generous. Varenyky are folded by hand at the Vinnytska Varenychna on Soborna 26, and what people carry home is heneralske salo, cured pork fat eaten with the ferocious local horseradish. Pan Zavarkin & Son on vul. Solovyova is a working café furnished as a merchant's parlour, a hundred-odd clocks and samovars in it. Two days runs to roughly 1,600 hryvnia a head at the frugal end, 4,900 in the middle, 13,700 for the suite and a private guide.

Two hours twenty from Kyiv

The Intercity+ from Kyiv takes two hours twenty; Lviv and Odesa are five to six hours out. Trams 1, 4 and 6 leave the station forecourt for Yevropeiska Ploshcha. Municipal transport here takes no cash at all — no paper ticket, no driver to pay. Tap a card, phone or watch on the validator, or scan a QR sticker in the saloon: yellow for PrivatBank, pink for monobank. The private yellow marshrutkas are the exception, at 30 hryvnia in coins.

14 July 2022, and since

At about 10:40 on 14 July 2022, Kalibr missiles fired from a submarine in the Black Sea hit the House of Officers and the streets around it, in the middle of a working Thursday. The city commemorates 29 dead, three of them children, and more than two hundred injured. Among them was Liza Dmytriieva, four years old, who had Down syndrome and was walking home from a speech therapy session.

It was not the only strike. The airport was hit in March 2022 with ten killed, drones have come repeatedly since, and on 24 March 2026 one person was killed and 21 injured in the city. Alerts are frequent and can run long; museums, the fountain and much of the centre stop while they do.