The hike will begin from Yurivka — one of the oldest settlements of the Dobropillia area.
The village is named in honour of its founder, Colonel Yuriev, owner of an estate on lands granted by Empress Catherine II. At the end of the 19th century the lands passed to German colonists; the homestead of one of them — Wiens — has survived, but is not in use. The single-storey building of red brick is crowned by an attic bearing the owner's name, Wiens, and the date the mansion was built.
Under the former landowner, farm buildings were erected.
On the shed the meticulous German left the figures of the year the building was put up — a place for keeping the oxen that were used to plough the fields.
The draught power of the cattle was replaced by an iron horse, the T-14, a veteran breadwinner raised up on a pedestal.
In Soviet times the collective farm was the best not only in the region but in all of Ukraine, famed for its records in the production of milk, meat and grain. The central estate of the exemplary Shevchenko farm is located in Yurivka.
A marker stone at the crossroads points with arrows to the approach to the flour mill and the oil press.
Cheerful mottoes and upbeat slogans on the fences, the bus stop and the walls call on people to observe safety rules at work, to protect life and health, and to buy Shevchenko farm produce.
The unfinished buildings and a closed shop do not lend a life-affirming mood.
The Orthodox Church of Agapit of the Caves occupies an adapted building from the early 20th century. A bell tower built on, wall painting and cupolas turned the neglected building into a church, while the informal approach to arranging the place of prayer broke the old canonical conventions of laying out church grounds. The cross above the gate is made in different planes, and its holder is wound with a garland-liana. In the corners of the church yard, gazebos in the cubist style have been created, resembling watchtowers. Using ceramic electrical insulators and other unexpected decorative elements, the innovator-craftsman worked in an avant-garde direction. Perhaps the aesthetic phenomenon helps to strengthen the spirit and shapes the parishioners' worldview.
It is commendable that beside the church there is a well with a new bucket, which matters to the traveller and the passer-by.
But most importantly, in the building of the administration of the Shevchenko agricultural enterprise a museum has operated since 2000 — of the village of Yurivka, the Shydlovo Colony, and the hamlets of Lyman, Kamianka, Leontiivka, Petrovsky and Zelenyi Klyn. Unfortunately, it was not possible to visit the museum because of the quarantine, but the open-air exhibition of sandstone artefacts is available for viewing all year round. On the clearing in front of the building, next to the monument to T. H. Shevchenko, are gathered millstones, rollers, threshing stones, road posts, mortars, troughs and implements for grinding grain.
The village is crossed by the Dyka gully, named so not because wild animals live in it — the pasture was favoured by local cows. Before the revolution the estate of the landowner Johann Dyck stood in the gully, and the keepers of history marked the place-name on a stone.
To the centre of the village council is a stone's throw — a little more than 1,200 metres along an asphalted road.
Shylivka was founded by German colonists in 1890 and was called the Shydlovo Colony after the landowner Shydler.
Immigrants from European kingdoms built at the start of the 20th century a hospital and a school in the village, handsome brick houses and a Lutheran church. The enterprising owners were deported to Kazakhstan before the Hitlerite occupation.
In one of the sturdy houses is the Orthodox Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin.
The two-storey school was built in 1974.
The schoolyard is adorned with wrought-iron sculptures, presented to the school in 2012 during a festival of the blacksmith's craft.
The preschoolers attend a kindergarten in the neighbouring building.
In the common grave rest 39 soldiers of the Red Army who died in 1943 during the liberation of Shylivka.
The artificial famine did not pass by the villages of the Shylivka village council, a grain granary of Ukraine. In memory of the victims of the Holodomor of 1932-1933 a memorial stone has been set up.
In a chain, at a distance of 500-1500 metres from one another, stand the villages of the Shylivka village council. The founders of the villages of Hulive, Myrne, Vasylivka and Novooleksandrivka settled on the bank of the Hryshynka river, which flows into the Byk near the hamlet of Lyman.
The village of Myrne arose on the lands of the landowner Wiens in 1917, where at first premises for sheep and shepherds appeared, and so the settlement was named Chebarnia.
Later the village changed its name in honour of the leader of the revolution, Lenin, and in 2016 it was renamed Myrne. On Myru Street, the only one in Myrne, is all the village infrastructure — a shop and a club.
The hub of culture moved from a two-storey building into a single-storey one, leaving the former to be torn apart by oblivion.
A marble slab depicting a soldier and the inscription "Eternal glory to the heroes 1941-1945" is set on the pedestal of the dismantled monument to Lenin.
The population in the villages is declining, and the last inhabitant left the hamlet of Petrivske in 2014.
This story is also available in Ukrainian: Юр'ївка, Шилівка, Мирне – від села до села
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