Yasinia

Yasinia was a country once. The Hutsul Republic was declared here on 8 January 1919, after the village rose against Hungarian troops; Stepan Klochurak, born in Yasinia, was elected its prime minister, it put about a thousand men under arms, seated a council of forty-two and sent delegates to the Labour Congress in Kyiv. Romanian troops ended it on 11 June.

It happened here because things have always passed through. The Chorna Tysa and the Lazeshchyna meet in this valley, the railway from the Hungarian plain arrived in 1895, and the road over the Yablunytsia pass comes down from Galicia. Svydovets stands on one shoulder, Chornohora on the other. Under Hungary the place was Kőrösmező, which names the same ash tree the Ukrainian does.

A shepherd, a blizzard and a name

A shepherd called Ivan Struk was driving his flock to the fair at Máramarossziget when an early autumn blizzard caught him at the confluence. He abandoned the sheep and went home. He came back in the spring expecting bones, found the flock alive and lambed, and settled among the ash trees. The church he built carries his name.

The written record starts in 1555. Today it is a settlement of about 8,500 people strung along the valley floor — large for a village, and officially one only since January 2024, when Ukraine abolished the urban-type-settlement category. Rakhiv is 31km down the Tysa. It reads rural rather than resort: gardens, timber yards, a station in the middle. Less polish than Yaremche, more mountain.

Timber, stone and two clocks

The Strukivska church — the Ascension, 1824, Hutsul type, on the far bank of the Chorna Tysa about 3km out — has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2013, one of sixteen listed across Poland and Ukraine. It is a working church, reached over a suspension footbridge that moves under you.

More timber: the Preobrazhenska church, in the cemetery between road and railway, was built at Yablunytsia around 1780 and carried here in 1871. The better detail is on the masonry churches in the centre. Sts Peter and Paul, 1814, raised by the descendants of Austrian loggers, has a real clock in its tower; the Pokrova church of 1903 has a painted one, the answer for a parish that could not afford the mechanism.

On a hill half a kilometre from the bus station is the kirkut, a nineteenth-century Jewish cemetery of about half a hectare. Several hundred matzevot stand there, carved with plants, birds, animals and stars, no two the same. The community that filled it was destroyed in the Second World War. The track up is unsurfaced, and in summer the grass hides ticks and snakes. Elsewhere: a local history museum working since 1966, a hrazhda, and monuments to Klochurak and the Klympush brothers.

The Kőrösmező node of the Árpád Line, the Hungarian defences of the Second World War, was among its most heavily built sections — anti-tank ditches, dragon’s teeth, pillboxes, some fifty rock-cut objects in the slopes around. In autumn 1944 Soviet troops crossed the Svydovets ridge and came at it from behind, which is why so much of it still stands. One restored bunker can be visited.

Drahobrat above, two ropes below

Winter runs two ways. Yasinia is the road-head for Drahobrat, Ukraine’s highest ski area, on the Svydovets at roughly 1,400–1,700m; the last stretch is a track, so you leave the car in the village and take a 4x4 transfer. Or you ski in the village itself: a drag on Kostyrivka in the centre, about 400m, and a longer one of some 800m in the Mlaky tract, 2.5km out. Both are learners’ slopes — empty, cheap, no queues.

The other winter ritual is the chan, a wood-fired tub of herb-steeped water outdoors, six at a squeeze, best with snow falling into it. The season runs from November to mid-April; the New Year and Christmas fortnight is the priciest and sells out first.

Where the trails go

Yasinia is a trailhead as much as a village. The Blyznytsia twins, the high points of Svydovets at about 1,883m, make a 20km day out past Drahobrat. Troiaska, 1,702m, is a 22km day the other way, past the Apshynets reserve. The two-day, 46km crossing to Vorokhta takes in Petros and Hoverla, at 2,061m the highest point in Ukraine. The mountain rescue service is based in the village, which is reassuring and also a hint about the weather. Chornohora sits on the state border, so check whether your route needs a border-guard permit before you set out.

Trains, and when to come

The train is the argument for Yasinia over most of this valley. Services on the Rakhiv line from Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa and Kharkiv stop here, so you can arrive with a rucksack and no car — rare in the Carpathians. Buses run from Ivano-Frankivsk, some with a change at Yaremche. Driving, it is the H-09 through Nadvirna, Yaremche and Tatariv, half an hour short of the village.

Come in winter for snow and tubs, or in September and October for the beech colour and lower prices. Pack for the mountains, not the valley: Svydovets changes its mind faster than the forecast does. Most people see Yasinia through a car window on the way up to Drahobrat. One night is enough to find the footbridge, the painted clock and the cemetery on the hill, which is more than the drive-through crowd take away.