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| A road sign on the T-04-28 road in Mezhova district |
The ear of grain is a symbol of farming, abundance, and rebirth. This work-stimulating appeal glorifies the toilers of the Mezhova area — a land of grain-growers.
The village of Zaporizke is located half a kilometre from Mezhova on the north-western side.
On three streets parallel to one another live fewer than 100 residents, whose main activity is their household plots.
In Zaporizke, livestock farms of the collective-farm period have survived. In recent years one rarely comes across surviving cowsheds; for the most part they have been turned into barns or into ruins.
The village is located beside the T-04-28 road, Dachne-Novopavlivka-Mezhova-Slovianka.
A dried-up well beside the road is covered over for safety.
On the drying, reed-choked stream several ponds have been created.
A snowless winter and a dry summer, but above all the destructive activity of man, contribute to the shallowing of water bodies and to changes in quality and a fall in the water level in wells. The ploughing of meadows and the closeness of agricultural lands to the coastal strip is one of the main factors in the disappearance of springs and small rivers in the steppe zone. The small river Lozova rises near the village of Novolozuvativka, which I shall see at the end of the journey, and flows into the Samara, which carries its waters into the mighty Dnipro. The narrow ribbon of the watercourse is barely visible in a shallow little ravine with ploughed slopes.
The road leads northward, and to the right of the course a group of burial mounds comes into view; only one burial of the Scythian-Sarmatian period has remained unploughed. Someone left a block of sandstone on it.
On the western side of the road lies the village of Slavne, founded in 1904, and to the east — Ukrainka, which is 10 years older.
At the turns into the villages, stopping shelters and toilets have been installed, which is rarely encountered on road journeys.
Slavne is famous for a remarkable botanical natural monument of artificial origin, which has the status of a model shelterbelt , the only one in Dnipropetrovsk region with oak plantings. The grove of almost century-old giants stretches along the road for 500 metres, thereby diversifying the natural stock of the Mezhova area. It is a pity that this sole green framing of the roads was not continued with plantings of forest-forming species.
The 46-kilometre highway runs into the M-04 road of international significance near Slovianka, but my path turned east to Ukrainka. On the western side the village is fenced off from the steppe wind by a green mass. Probably it is an abandoned orchard, since the trees planted in it in rows have long gone wild, and self-sown poplars and acacias have joined them.
The fertile lands near the village do not lie idle but belong to an agricultural enterprise.
In Ukrainka there are 3 streets — Gagarin, Osinnia, and Sviatkova.
The main type of activity of the villagers is growing crops. Agricultural machinery, during the harvest season and the preparation of arable land for the sowing of winter crops, is parked beside the household plots.
The school in Ukrainka was built in the first years of Soviet rule from the material of a church destroyed in Slovianka.
The new building opened its doors in 1967 for the anniversary of the Great October, as the date on the pediment and a memorial board attest. I saw the same kind of board in Raipole on the building of the village administration. It seems that the 50th anniversary of the 1917 revolution was celebrated in the district with a flourish.
The educational establishment is designed for 100 pupils, but at present only a few pupils of the junior classes study there.
The school has a canteen and a first-aid post.
In the school yard is a military burial of 115 soldiers of the Red Army who died in September 1943 during the liberation of the village.
In 2017 the remains of an unknown soldier were reburied in the common grave.
The surnames of the fellow-villager soldiers are commemorated on the memorial board of the memorial sign in honour of the fallen countrymen.
The shop and post office in Ukrainka seem to have been closed long ago.
It was possible to preserve the library, beside which a bust of the national poet T. H. Shevchenko has been set up.
On the eastern outskirts of the village lies one of the arms of the Sukhareva Ravine landscape reserve, created for the purpose of preserving the natural stock of the Mezhova area. Along the road from Ukrainka to Novolozuvativka a kilometre-long shelterbelt of poplars, ash, and fruiting apple trees, created through the efforts of good people, shields the traveller from the scorching rays and gusts of the steppe wind.
Here is the source of the drying little river Lozova, but finding it after a dry summer is practically impossible.
A white-stone two-tier water tower on the territory of the ruined farms no longer serves its purpose.
In other villages of the district I came across the same kind of bus stops, faced with tiles, but buses on the village streets never once caught my eye.
The date of the founding of Novolozuvativka is recorded as 1881, and it numbers a little more than 200 residents.
In the village two parallel streets have formed, on which, along with sturdy houses with natural gas laid on, I managed to see genuine rarities of the folk architecture of the Dnipro region. In the steppe zone the hatas were built of straw mixed with clay, the so-called mazankas. If little bricks were formed from the straw and clay, such a house was called saman. Characteristically, the housewives whitewashed their dwelling several times a year, so that the house looked neat.
Across fields, steppes, and village streets, 22 kilometres were covered in 5 hours.
The final stop is Mezhova. The road led to a memorial sign on the road roundabout in the form of an ear of grain — the largest 3-D depiction of a cereal inflorescence in Ukraine and a confirmation that the Mezhova area is a land of Grain-growers.
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