The Smotrych river carved a loop so tight that it left a plateau almost entirely surrounded by a canyon 40 m deep, connected to the rest of the world by a narrow neck. Someone was always going to build a town on it, and by the fourteenth century someone had.
The castle
The Old Castle guards the neck, with eleven towers of different dates from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. It was Ruthenian, Lithuanian, Polish, Ottoman between 1672 and 1699 — the only time the Ottomans held it, following a siege in which the poet-soldier defenders are recorded in detail — and then Polish again, Russian and Ukrainian. The Turkish minaret still stands beside the Catholic cathedral, topped since 1756 with a gilded statue of the Virgin, a compromise nobody has undone.
The old town
Inside the canyon loop the town preserves Polish, Armenian and Ruthenian quarters, a town hall from the fourteenth century, and enough surviving stonework to make walking it worthwhile. The canyon floor can be walked, and the view up at the castle from below is better than the view from it.
Khotyn
Twenty kilometres away across the Dniester, the fortress of Khotyn stands on the river bank with 40 m walls and is one of the most photographed buildings in Ukraine, partly because it has appeared in dozens of films. The 1621 battle here halted an Ottoman advance into the Commonwealth.
Bakota and the Dniester
Downstream, the Dniester canyon runs for 250 km with cliffs, meanders and the flooded village of Bakota, whose cave monastery from the eleventh century survives above the waterline. It is one of the best rafting and kayaking stretches in the country.
Around Podillia
The region holds a dense set of castles and palaces in varying states: Medzhybizh, Zbarazh, Terebovlia, Skalat and the palace at Chernivtsi, the former Metropolitan residence and now a university, itself a UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the strangest and most beautiful buildings in eastern Europe.
Practicalities
Kamianets-Podilskyi is four hours from Lviv by road and is reachable by train from Kyiv. The region is in the far west and has been relatively less affected by the war, but the same rules on alerts and curfews apply everywhere in the country.