Staryi Vovchynets

The first written mention of the village of Staryi Vovchynets in Hlyboka district dates back to 1703. In 1774, it became the property of the Barnovsky Monastery, and in 1780, Russian Old Believers began to settle it along with the surrounding villages. The village is famous for its museum, one of the largest public museums in Bukovyna.

Today, Staryi Vovchynets is famous primarily for its local history museum, which can rightly be considered one of the best rural museums not only in Bukovyna but also in Ukraine as a whole. The museum was founded in 1957 by history teacher Ivan Topalo. For more than half a century of its existence, the museum has collected unique exhibits dating back to the Paleolithic period and ending with the present day. The oldest exhibits are mammoth tusks and bones and primitive tools.

A valuable exhibit of the museum is a wooden peasant hut, around which the yard of a Bukovinian rural estate is recreated: a wicker fence with jugs on pegs, cultivated beds. The house presents a variety of household utensils: dishes, furniture, lamps, clothes, shoes. Most of the exhibits are kept in a specially adapted room. Recently, the museum opened an exhibition of pottery from the late XIX - first half of the XX century, made by potters from the surrounding villages and neighboring Romania, including more than 70 samples of makiters, pots, jugs, and bowls. The attention of tourists will be drawn to a majestic table with a collection of several hundred different Easter eggs behind glass.

A few years ago, a chapel was built on the museum's territory in memory of the victims of communist repression. In front of its entrance, there is a special room with an exhibition with the names and photographs of 60 victims of the totalitarian regime - residents of Staryi Vovchytsia who died in concentration camps in 1944-1945. In the village, you can also visit the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, built in 1900. Like most of the stone churches in the area, the church in Staryi Vovchynets bears the features of Romanian architecture, but differs from similar typical churches by octagonal towers with onion-shaped domes attached to the Babynets on both sides and a disproportionately wide three-tiered bell tower that looks more like a giant rotunda.

Today, the villages of Staryi Vovchynets and Bila Krynytsia form one village council with its center in Staryi Vovchynets. The population of the village is about 2050 people. Leon Oziasovych Kopelman (1904-1982), an outstanding watercolorist and graphic artist who modernized traditional themes and combined the features of Renaissance and expressionist prints, was born in the village.

Bicycle route "Bila Krynytsia": Cherepkivtsi - Staryi Vovchynets - Bila Krynytsia - Kamianka - Cherepkivtsi: duration: 6 hours. Route length: almost 30 km. Height gain: 84 м. The route begins at the bus station near the Vadul-Siret customs post in Cherepkivtsi and leads to the villages of Staryi Vovchynets and Bila Krynytsia via a railway crossing; then, past water bodies and forests, the marked route leads to Kamianka, from where it heads back to Cherepkivtsi.

Along the route you can see:

• churches in the villages of Kamianka, Bila Krynytsia, Staryi Vovchynets, and Cherepkivtsi;
• local history museums in Bila Krynytsia and Staryi Vovchynets;
• the surrounding landscapes.