I travelled down from Kyiv to Uzhhorod on an overnight train in August 2024. Situated on the River Uzh, on the border with Slovakia, Uzhhorod is the capital of Ukraine’s Transcarpathia Region. One of the smallest regional capitals, with fewer than 120,000 people in 2022, Uzhhorord is far from the war in the east of the country. When I visited, Transcarpathia was the only one of Ukraine’s regions that did not have any night-time curfew. In contrast to Kyiv and all the other cities in Ukraine where I had stayed that summer, there were no air raid alerts and no power cuts during my three days in Uzhhorod.
Uzhhorod castle
Like other places in western Ukraine, Uzhhorod has a complicated history, having changed hands several times during the twentieth century. For centuries, the city had been part of Hungary, and was named Ungvár, castle on the River Ung, of which Uzhhorod is a direct translation. The castle itself sits on a hill overlooking the river. A postcard from a hundred years ago shows an imposing view of the castle from across the river. The view is blocked today. But with the steep slopes around it, and the imposing walls and deep ditch that surround it, it must have been a formidable fortress. By the 18th century, its defensive purpose had largely been superseded, and, inside its walls, its buildings were remodelled for the comfort of the aristocratic families that lived there. Most notable of its residents were Count Miklós Bercsényi and his wife, Kristina Drugeth, at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th centuries, at the time one of the richest and most powerful aristocratic families in Hungary. Bercsényi played an important part in the failed Ferenc II Rákóczi rebellion against Hapsburg rule, and the couple ended up living out their days in Turkish exile.
Following the First World War, Uzhhorod became part of the new state of Czechoslovakia. The Transcarpathian region was known as Ruthenia, a name that had once been applied to the whole of medieval Kievan Rus, which comprised much of modern-day Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia. By the late-nineteenth century, the name “Ukrainian” had largely supplanted “Ruthene”. For a time, the question of whether the Ruthenes of Transcarpathia were a distinct nation or part of the wider Ukrainian people was open. In March 1939, as what remained of Czechoslovakia after the 1938 Munich agreement was dismembered by Nazi Germany and Hungary, an independent state of Carpatho-Ukraine was briefly declared by a leading local politician, Avgustyn Voloshyn. The language of the new state was declared to be Ukrainian, and its national anthem was to be “Ukraine has not yet Perished”, thus clearly identifying the Ruthenian people of Transcarpathia as Ukrainian. It only lasted a few hours, as Hungarian troops swiftly occupied the region. Voloshyn sought refuge in Prague. In 1944, the advancing Soviet Army occupied Transcarpathia and incorporated it into Soviet Ukraine. When the Soviets reached Prague in May 1945, Voloshyn was arrested by the NKVD and carted off to Moscow, where he died a couple of months later. In 2002, Voloshyn was recognised as a “Hero of Ukraine”. There is a statue of him next to the river in the centre of Uzhhorod.
The Synagogue, Uzhhorod
While the wider territory of Transcarpathia was and is predominantly Ukrainian-inhabited, Uzhhorod itself had, until World War II, been multi-ethnic, with Hungarians and Jews predominating, as well as Ukrainians and Slovaks. A strip of territory along the border with Hungary was also predominantly ethnic-Hungarian. Little remains of the Hungarian and Jewish presence now. Most ethnic-Hungarians had moved to Hungary, while almost the entire Jewish community had been transported to Auschwitz in 1944, along with the rest of Hungary’s Jews. A few ethnic-Hungarians remain. As I walked through a residential neighbourhood one morning, a lady called out in Hungarian from her balcony to a passing friend. Next to the castle, I dined in a Hungarian restaurant. But Uzhhorod today is a Ukrainian city. The language-rights of the ethnic-Hungarian minority in Transcarpathia has been at the forefront of fraught relations between Hungary and Ukraine following the passing of controversial laws on education and language in Ukraine, putting Transcarpathia’s Hungarians in the uncomfortable position of a political football in the disputes between the two countries.
Next to the river, a huge synagogue, built at the beginning of the 20th century, is a testament to the city’s once thriving Jewish community. Since the annihilation of that community, it has served as a concert hall. Outside the building, a memorial to the local victims of the Holocaust, now looking rather uncared for, was erected in 2016. The building, unmistakenly a synagogue, despite its repurposing, remains one of the most striking buildings in the city.
The Faculty of Physics and Biology, Uzhhorod
Another building that I found particularly striking was the Faculty of Physics and Biology. Walking down a cobbled lane from the castle, the large building, with its high arched windows, the walls painted orange on the lower two stories, and unadorned stone higher up, looms at the bottom of the hill, its colours in different shades depending on the light at different times of the day. Like much of the old town of Uzhhorod, it is rather run-down and in need of renovation. But there is a faded grander in its shabbiness.
As elsewhere in Ukraine nowadays, the statues tell a lot about how the country has been changing over recent decades, those that have been built, those that have been toppled, and those that have been allowed to remain. An empty plinth close to the river still bears the name of Pushkin. Russian cultural figures are no longer celebrated. Their statues are being removed, and streets named after them renamed. Uzhhorod’s statue of Lenin was felled long ago. But historical figures associated with other states to which Uzhhorod once belonged are still marked. Not far from the castle, across the road from the Greek Catholic Holy Cross Cathedral, is a small statue of the 18th-century Austrian Empress Maria-Theresa. Tomáš Masaryk, the founding father and first president of Czechoslovakia, has a street named after him, as well as a school, and there is a bust of him in one of the city’s parks. Close to the river is a big old ash tree commemorating Masaryk. Close-by his bust, is a statue of Milan Rastislav Štefánik, a Slovak who served as a French general, and along with Masaryk was one of the leading figures in the movement for an independent Czechoslovak republic.
Museum of Folk Architecture and Life, Uzhhorod
Close to the castle, the outdoor Museum of Folk Architecture and Life was a delightful, as well as educational place to visit on a warm summer’s afternoon. The museum contains numerous traditional houses transported from villages around Transcarpathia, laid out in streets, with gardens, many of them wooden, some with thatched roofs. Inside the houses are items of furniture, ornate traditional clothes and material, as well as artifacts including looms. The centrepiece is the wooden Church of St Michael, with its high spire and, inside, among the icons, a graphic depiction of the last judgement.