Bruno Schulz was born in Drohobych in 1892, spent most of his life here and was shot in its streets by a German officer in 1942. The writer and painter, whose strange, dreamlike stories turned this small Galician town into a place of myth, drew on the old market square, the narrow lanes and the attic rooms of a Jewish merchant family, and the town today is part of his legacy. Drohobych, with a population of nearly eighty thousand, grew rich on salt and oil, and the oil wells of nearby Boryslav gave the region the nickname of Galicia's Texas in the late nineteenth century. Ivan Franko, the great Ukrainian writer, went to school here.
In the middle of the old town, the wooden church of St George stands behind a low wall. A few centuries old, it is a tiered structure with a shingled roof that rises like a pagoda over the nave, a typical Galician form, and it is one of the wooden churches of the Carpathian region on the World Heritage list. The interior is painted with scenes and saints, and the wood has darkened with time, with a smell of wax and old timber. Beside it stands a bell tower, also wooden, and an old cemetery of crosses.
The ride from here goes west into the Carpathians, toward the Polish and Slovak borders, to Polonina Wetlinska and Smerek in the Bieszczady and the Bukovske Vrchy on the Slovak side. These are the wild, grass-covered ridges of the eastern Carpathians, famous for their bison, bears and lynx, and for a sense of emptiness that is rare in Europe. The mountain roads are narrow, often unpaved in places, and the borders have official crossings where queues can build up, so check the opening hours and rules. The landscape is gentle and open, with beech forest, and in autumn the forest glows orange.
Please check the current travel advice before planning any ride in Ukraine, because conditions can change quickly and vary by region. Drohobych has fuel stations, supermarkets and cafes, and Stebnyk, a town just to the east, has a known history of salt mining. The local cuisine includes borscht, varenyky, and honey cake, and Truskavets, a spa town nearby, is famous for its mineral water. In summer, the town is warm and leafy, and in winter snow lies thick on the roofs of the old church.