Chotyniec-Tserkva of the Birth of the Bles and Drohobych-Tserkva of Saint George\t
Plan this ride
Recorded distance
277 km
Riding-time estimate
5 h 18
Journey
Recorded itinerary
Distance and timing basis
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
From Stubno it runs 277 km to Stubno; allow about 5 h 18 of riding. On the way it passes Roztochya, Drohobych-Tserkva of Saint George\t and back through Roztochya. It crosses from Poland into Ukraine - carry ID and check the toll rules. It suits an unhurried touring pace.
Waypoint introductions and full write-ups
1. Chotyniec-Tserkva of the Birth of the Bles
Out on the flat, open country east of the San river, close to the Ukrainian border, stands a wooden church that has been watching the fields for more than four hundred years. The Church of the Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Chotyniec dates from the early seventeenth century and belongs to the eastern tradition of Christian building in this borderland, where Ruthenian communities worshipped in the Greek rite. It is one of the churches listed together as the Wooden Tserkvas of the Carpathian Region, and it has a tall, three-part design, with a nave, a smaller chancel and a bell tower, each topped by a wooden cupola.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Planning note
Chotyniec-Tserkva of the Birth of the Bles is where the day begins. Next is Roztochya.
2. Roztochya
Roztochia is a low, wooded ridge that runs like a spine from southeastern Poland down to the outskirts of Lviv, and on its Ukrainian end, between Ivano-Frankove and Novoyavorivsk, lies the Roztochia nature reserve. Its old beech woods were added in 2017 to the UNESCO listing of Ancient and Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and Other Regions of Europe, a chain of forests that tells the story of how beech recolonised the continent after the Ice Age. The ridge is also a watershed: rain that falls on one side ends up in the Baltic by way of the Vistula, and on the other in the Black Sea by way of the Dniester. Standing on a hilltop and knowing that is oddly satisfying.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Planning note
Roztochya comes up about 54 km into the recorded legs. Next is Drohobych-Tserkva of Saint George\t.
3. Drohobych-Tserkva of Saint George\t
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.