France is sweet, but Podolia is even sweeter. You’ve never heard of it? No problem; go there. It’s in Ukraine, beyond the Carpathians. It is one of the many regions lost in the great simplification enacted in Central Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. You’ll see an endless sea of wheat, and fortresses and palisades along the rivers, where at a certain hour, there springs forth from the ravines, as though from a fountain, a prune-colored liquid shade that fills every dip and basin and spreads out over the hills. In France and Italy, evening descends from the sky; in Podolia it rises from the earth.
The Loire is glorious, and the Rhine is too, but looking out over the Dniester literally takes your breath away. It has the primordial meanderings of the Po but without the wearisome flatness. It flows in a sunken bed, and its castles regard it from on high with the glowering eyes of Cossack warriors. The Loire is a sleeping beauty. The Dniester, on the other hand, has the vital potency of a limes, a place where armies, caravans, horses, and camels come to drink, where the pealing of church bells clashes violently with the chant of the muezzin. If there exists a frontier, this is it.
Before coming to Ukraine, I didn’t believe there could be anything more formidable than the fortress in Petrovaradin, high above the Danube, built by the Austrians north of Belgrade as a bastion against the Turks. Now I’m looking at the massive towers of Khotyn as they stretch out their shadows over the Dniester, and I’m forced to change my mind. Around its walls in the seventeenth century, thirty-five thousand Poles and forty thousand Cossacks stopped two hundred thousand Turks, and the clash was so powerful that the sky itself caught on fire and the walls shook from the cannon volleys. This is where King Jan III Sobieski and his cavalry overcame their ancestral fear of the Turks, whom they would then go on to defeat definitively under the walls of Vienna.
I look out over the river flowing in the night. The northwest wind swells it and pushes it toward the sea as it would a sailboat in a mistral, carries the smell of stubble from the sea of grain all around, holds up two storks suspended in air like gliders, blows into the half-empty bottle of Sarmat beer—what a name!—that I’m holding and makes it sing like a flute. A sailboat goes by, the Dniester turns silver, the sky purple, and the riverbanks seem still to be echoing with the shouts of soldiers, merchants, and customs officers.
Kamianets-Podilskyi is a place unique in all the world: a natural fortress city. They built it on the Smotrych River, a left tributary of the Dniester that forms large bends and cuts a canyon through the limestone table of Podolia. At the point where the river does an almost complete switchback and seems to have decided to go back where it came from, forming a sort of omega, a city grew up that is naturally defended by the river and watched over at its only point of contact with the right bank by a formidable castle. With its huge perimeter walls and a dizzyingly high bridge, the bastion controls access to the city and, in the gorge fifty yards below it, passage on the river, navigable until very recently.
When the river is in spate, the channel above the bend and the channel below the bend, separated by a narrow, rocky interspace presided over by a hydroelectric power station, can be connected directly. A perfect system, which the Turks—in the twenty-seven years of their dominion—not only didn’t destroy, but improved. In Kamianets, it is said that the Ottomans, when they were forced to leave, buried a hidden treasure in the riverbed and that some years ago scientists in Kiev organized a secret expedition to search for the sultan’s gold.
The upper city is a world unto itself, where the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suffered almost no changes during the Communist regime. Next to the Baroque church of the Dominican monastery, the Turks built a minaret, transforming the building into a mosque. When the Christians came back, rather than demolish the tower of prayer erected by the infidels, they put a stunning statue of the Madonna on the top, which today can still be seen from afar like a lighthouse in the sea of grain of Ukraine. Neither the Turks nor the Poles destroyed the religious symbols of their predecessors. They limited themselves to inhabiting them, wisely recognizing that the god of the others was the same as their own.
It wasn’t only a matter of respect, but also of economics and common sense. There was no point in destroying a place of worship in excellent condition. In the Dominican church in Kamianets, the qibla—the superb niche topped by a shell (a single piece of white marble!) that indicates the direction of Mecca—was not removed or modified but ably integrated into a staircase made of the same marble, where the words of the prophet are decorated with gesticulating chubby little angels and meringue-like Baroque swirls. Cultural conflict already had inflamed Europe back then, but the opposing parties—contrary to today—did everything possible to know each other.
Confirmation of this arrives on the padded stairs of the little hotel where we have found a room. They are inhabited by oil portraits of armed men who appear to be modeled on the stereotype of the cutthroat Turk. But as soon as I read the labels on the frames, I discover that they portray instead the most ardent adversaries of the Sublime Porte, the Cossacks. The faces looking at me are those of their historical leaders: the hetmans—the bald Severyn Nalyvaiko, the grim Maxym Zalizniak, the one-eyed Danylo Apostol. Beyond the landing, I’m ogled by the fat Pavlo Polubotok and the proud Bogdan Khmelnytsky, the most famous of all. As on other European frontiers—Croatia and Poland, for example—the defenders of the nation seem as though they try their damnedest to resemble their worst enemies.
We walk into the sunset on a stone stairway that leads down to the river toward a small wooden Orthodox church flanked by majestic trees. Kamianets is still aflame in sunlight, a Greek sunlight. But down by the river there is shade and cool air. On the banks, a dozen houses surrounded by greenery and a great swooping of swallows. This is the neighborhood called Karavasari, because once, many years ago—as the locals tell it—a Jewish woman named Sara lived here and turned it into a stopping place for caravans. Over time, the two words were joined together, and Karavan, joined with Sara, became Karavasari.
An elderly couple is relaxing on the grass, enjoying the cool air. He rolls himself a cigarette and plays with some white doves that he has just liberated from a dovecote. She has a crutch, a cane, and three thin ropes with which, standing still as though at the center of a spiderweb, she manages to govern the grazing of three kid goats whose collars are attached to the ropes. Above the two, way high up, the battlements of the fortress tinted orange. They are Viktor and Lyuba, next-door neighbors, born and raised in Karavasari.
All it takes is a “Good evening” from Monika, and they start talking to us as though that was all they had been waiting for. They start with the genesis of the place. All elderly Russians begin their stories from way back when.
Viktor points out the vertical rocks that stand way over our heads, a bit like the cave dwellings of Matera or of Chaco Canyon in Navajo country, rimmed by the last orange glow of sunset.
“Look, that used to be sea…. Genesis doesn’t lie; the Flood did all this. It fashioned the white rocks from which the city was built, its walls, its cathedral, its castle.”
“The ships on the Dniester came up this far; the river was much deeper then,”
Lyuba recounts, hobbling over toward the river on her crutch. The vertical rocks between the castle and the river form a natural amphitheater, and her voice carries, full and round, in the perfect acoustics of the place. Flowing water, screeching swallows, legions of croaking frogs. In the distance, barking dogs and shouting children multiplied by the echo of the cliffs. On the other side of the river, a group of men is fixing the bridge over the mouth of a torrent. I can hear their laughter. Chimneys are smoking. The smell of soup is carried on the breeze.