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In 1648, a Cossack uprising took place here under the leadership of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, whose name the city later adopted.

If you are wondering what a tourist heading to Ukraine can do in Khmelnytskyi—a city that had its five minutes of tragic fame when a Russian missile struck a civilian building in 2023—let me tell you it all began with a car breakdown.

The car suddenly stopped working, in the middle of the night and halfway between Ternopil and Lviv.

The tank was full, the battery charged, the fuses intact. When I ran out of ideas, I left my family in the car and went looking for a village or even a farmstead.

As it turned out, in this misfortune there was a bit of luck: after a few kilometers I found a farm where a group of young guys were tinkering with their tuned Ladas. They towed my car to their place and, after a quick inspection, said the fuel pump wasn’t working, although once removed it looked fine.

At the time, I had a Peugeot 406—the first of the 4 series models with an onboard computer. The boys in their shed couldn’t help me further, but they towed us again and pulled the car to the Volkswagen / Audi / Skoda dealership and service in Ternopil.

Now, a small digression about Ukrainian motoring at the beginning of our century. There were still many Soviet-era vehicles on the roads, but also a lot of Japanese brands, which—thanks to the absence of EU tariffs—were more popular than European cars. After all, who wouldn’t prefer a Mitsubishi Lancer over a much more expensive VW Golf?

I don’t know how to explain it—maybe a trauma from wartime, or on the contrary, nostalgia for the old alliance—but in Ukraine, when it came to EU cars, only German brands really mattered: Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Volkswagen.

And there I was, arriving in a Peugeot…

At the time, there were only three Peugeot dealers in Ukraine, so the mechanics at the Ternopil Volkswagen service suggested three options and three cities with Peugeot services:

Lviv – the prudent option, but it meant turning back and possibly giving up on the trip to Foros in Crimea.
Khmelnytskyi – the bold but realistic option.
Kyiv – the very unrealistic option, too far and off-route, meaning moving away from Poland without getting closer to Crimea.

And so we found ourselves in Khmelnytskyi—the Great Enigma.

And it turned out to be a Great Positive Surprise.

Khmelnytskyi is not a tourist city, but nonetheless it is very friendly, clean, and well organized. Original playgrounds for children, restaurants, and beer gardens meant that after all the stressful events, one could finally relax and brace oneself for what the foul Eupatoria would later throw at us.

The city of Khmelnytskyi is one of the larger cities in Ukraine, located in the central part of the country at the crossroads of important communication routes. Its population is around 240,000.

The history of the city dates back to the 14th century, when a settlement was established in the area of today’s market square. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Khmelnytskyi was an important trade and craft center in Ukraine.