Stuzhitsa village. Mineral stream. Old oaks.

The village Stuzhitsa of the Velykobereznians’kyi area is known, first of all, due to its mineral stream and a few old oak trees, which are several hundred years old. There are several sources, in fact, but most of them are very difficult to reach, that’s why the attention should be paid to one. The village Stuzhitsa was found in 1559. Its territory is 6.5 square kilometers. Approximately a thousand people live in the village.

The frontier, which was built in 1951 and has never been repaired since that time, has been reconstructed recently on the outskirts of Stuzhitsa. This event is very important for border guards, because one of the popular “routes of illegal migration” passes through the outskirts of Stuzhitsa, bringing profits to certain people and much trouble to others.

The village Stuzhitsa is attractive to tourists for one more reason, too. Here starts the tourist route to the Kremenets mountain, which converges the three borders: Ukrainian, Polish and Slovak. The commemorative stele is set on the place of converge and the holy spring flows nearby. There is one inconvenience for tourists visiting this route – everyone should get a permission to go there in order to avoid problems with the border guards.

The main mineral source that deserves a compulsory attendance is located actually outside the village, in the forest, 2.5 km aside from the road. You can see beautiful stunning landscapes on your way up to the source. Our company was walking on this route exactly when it almost started to rain. Just have a look at the clouds over the mountains on the other side of the village! Cool!



Sometimes during the walk everything around you becomes bright green. There are the overgrowths of horsetail on the roadside. Hundreds of thousands of bright stems affect your eye color perception.



A few steep ascents pass through the old fir groves. You continue going down the path, staring around, and then suddenly everything becomes dark. I pulled the levels of the photo up toward the light shades with the aim to make the boulders and trees more visible. Although in the reality it was much darker.



And here is the long-awaited source. Ascent to it from the village made me sweat a bit. Pay attention to the level of the iron content of water. We visited the source in autumn, when the leaves, fallen from the trees, were deep brown. And even in such a riot of colors, look how contrasting the water in the source looks. If you look closely, you can see the trail, which passes to the right from the source. This is one of tourist routes, passing on the outskirts of the village Stuzhitsa exactly in the area of the mineral source. If you go 5-6 km upwards this path, you will get to the tract “Chorni mlaka”. On the 9th of June 1866 one of the fragments of “Knyaginski” meteorite fell down in this territory. The fragment was 280 kg of weight and was found by a local resident at the time of haymaking. After some time, this fragment was sold to the Imperial Museum in Vienna, where it remains up to this day.



Let’s return to the source. Here is a larger perspective. The contrast looks even more noticeable. The water, by the way, is very tasty. In my personal ranking of mineral water flavors that I’ve ever tasted, this one is in the top 5.



We return to the village and drive to the center. Some very old oak trees grow exactly here. The oldest of them you can see in the photo below. It is about 500 years old. One local teacher told me that the kids from the village school sometimes amuse themselves by trying to embrace this tree in less of possible “quantity of hands”. I have forgotten the figure, but I guess the teacher was talking about seven children.



The next picture is the trunk of an old oak closer. The fence in the foreground is up to my neck. So, try to imagine the scale.



A few more old oaks, each of them 200-300-400 years old, are growing on the land of local residents within a kilometer territory.



Update: Approximately in October 2009 a series of articles appeared in local newspapers. According to them, the old oak in the village Stuzhitsa is much more than 500 years old and that it is the oldest oak in the territory of Ukraine. It is even older than the famous “Zheleznyak” oak. It is the second oldest tree in Ukraine after the ancient olive tree from the Nikitskiy Garden. As for me, it is hard to believe that the oak tree in Stuzhitsa, according to some data, is from 1200 to 1500 years of age. I have seen some older-looking trees in the territory of Transcarpathia. Nevertheless, the above said information is available.

09.03.2010. 08:14

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