Trukhaniv Island

The bridge across to it is 429 metres of welded steel, opened in July 1957 and still the only pedestrian crossing of the Dnipro in Kyiv. Walk it and, ten minutes after leaving the metro, you are standing on sand with 450 hectares of willow forest at your back. Trukhaniv is the largest island in the city — five kilometres long, up to a kilometre wide — lying opposite the historic centre between the main channel and the quieter Chortoryi branch.

In summer it runs loud: swimmers, cyclists, rowing crews, barbecue smoke over every free patch of grass. Fifteen minutes inland the noise stops. Willows, meadow, sand tracks, nobody. Both versions of the island have their regulars.

The town that stood here

Nobody has settled the name. It is traced either to tarkhan, a settlement holding certain privileges, or to the Cuman khan Tuhorkan, whose daughter, married to Prince Sviatopolk of Kyiv, is said to have had a residence here in the late 11th century. A Rus-era village called Olzhychi stood here, linked by tradition to Princess Olha; in 1534 it was granted to the Pustynno-Mykilskyi monastery, and the city took it back in 1698.

Its real population arrived with the steamships. Repair yards opened here in the later 19th century, and from the 1880s a settlement of river workers — the vodnyky — grew around them: 21 streets and lanes and a square by 1908, some 6,000 residents, a school from 1909 and, consecrated in 1910, the Church of St Elizabeth, paid for by David Marhulin. Of 367 houses counted in the late 1920s, two were stone.

On 27 September 1943 German troops burned the settlement to the ground — homes for around 7,000 people. They were fortifying the Dnipro against the Red Army gathering on the left bank, and the wooded island blocked their field of view. Nothing was rebuilt. A memorial raised in 1989, a figure beside a broken boat with plaques naming the dead, stands for what was lost; the foundations of the church and the school are still traceable in the undergrowth.

Sand, willows and 44 protected hectares

The beaches are wide and they keep going. Central Beach is the organised one — changing huts, cafés, rental kiosks — and the sand runs on in both directions until the crowds thin out. Kyiv has not declared an official bathing season since the full-scale invasion; the beaches work as sunbathing and picnic ground, and people swim on their own judgement.

Behind the sand the island turns wild. Willows and poplars, meadow clearings, shaded paths that shut out the river. In May 2019 the city council put 44.4 hectares under protection as a landscape reserve, 26.4 of them here.

How to spend a day

Rowing clubs work off the island's channels, so an eight or a dragon-boat crew may well slide past while you are still choosing where to put the towel. The cycle-and-pedestrian route through the middle, laid out in 2014, covers the length of the island fastest, with trail loops for runners and mountain bikers off it.

The unhurried version is the walk: over the bridge, along the shore, past the 1989 memorial, out to a bank where central Kyiv stands up in front of you. Come late — the last hour of light lands straight on the bluffs and their domes.

Getting across, and the station that never opened

No public transport runs onto the island; you arrive on foot or on two wheels. The Park Bridge is the usual way in, starting on vul. Naberezhno-Khreshchatytska by the Magdeburg Law monument; its red cycle lane dates from the 2017 overhaul. The nearest metro is Poshtova Ploshcha on the blue line, 10–15 minutes along the embankment; or ride the funicular down from Volodymyrska Hirka and walk the last stretch.

The island is also supposed to have its own metro station. Trukhaniv Ostriv was built in its main structures in 2004–2006, on the lower deck of the Podilskyi bridge crossing above Babyne Lake, between Sudnobudivna and Zatoka Desenka. Two decades on, the line is still unfinished.

When to come

Late spring and early September are the best of it: warm enough for the cycle paths and the picnic clearings, without the July crush. Midsummer weekends are when everything is open and everyone is out. Winter strips the island back to dog walkers, bare willows and a half-frozen Dnipro.

One practical note: the Park Bridge has been under capital repair since August 2025, with restrictions along its length. People are still getting across, but check before you build a route around it.