Old postcards hiking trails Transcarpathia

Hiking Trails of Transcarpathia is a 1970 set of Soviet postcards laid out like a walking route. There are almost no city streets: the cards lead from the Uzh River and its bridge in Uzhhorod to turbazy (Soviet tourist hostels), bivouacs and the peaks of the Chornohora massif. Even the scenes are chosen in a hiking spirit, with titles such as “Tourist Song”, “Tourist Bivouac” and “Mountain Landscape”.

The two main summits are Hoverla and Petros. At 2,061 metres, Hoverla is the highest point in Ukraine and stands on the border of the Transcarpathian and Ivano-Frankivsk regions; the first tourist route to its peak was marked in 1880. Petros (2,020 m) is its neighbour in the same massif. At their foot, on the Chorna Tysa River, lies Yasinia, and the set includes the Yasinia turbaza and its branch.

Beyond the peaks there is a turbaza in Lumshory, the Syniak and Karpaty sanatoriums (Soviet health resorts), the town of Rakhiv, trembita players and Lake Synevyr. The trembita is a huge wooden horn whose sound carries for kilometres. Synevyr, the largest lake in the Ukrainian Carpathians, lies at 989 metres and formed about 10,000 years ago when an earthquake-triggered landslide dammed a narrow valley.

Seen on these 1970 cards, Hoverla and Synevyr look the way they were offered to hikers more than half a century ago.