Feofaniya Park

Take marshrutka 444 from Teremky metro and you'll end up on the southern outskirts of the city at Feofaniya, which covers 1.5 square kilometres and is big enough that you won't see all of it in an afternoon. It's the park Kyivans go to when they want woodland rather than a city square. Pirogovo leaves from the same metro station on a different marshrutka, so the two make an easy pair if you're coming this far out.

The Church of St Pantaleon sits at the centre of it, a large Eastern Orthodox church along the lines of Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, and most walks through the park end up passing it.

What to Do Here

There are a number of lakes, plenty of woodland paths and a children's playground, and the whole thing is laid out for walking rather than for attractions. Bring a picnic and plan on a few hours.

Find the springs while you're here. One is a worship spring called "Tears of the Mother of God". The other is worth a look for a stranger reason: its temperature barely moves all year, never dropping below 4 degrees in winter and never rising above 8 in summer.

It's a good park for families, and with under-7s going free it's a cheap day out. Kyoto Park out at the other end of the network is the small, formal opposite of this if you only have an hour.

The History Under the Trees

The land was first recorded in 1471 under an owner called Khodiki, but the Feofaniya you walk through dates from 1803, when Theophanes-Shylanov-Cherniavsky, a member of the Byzantine aristocracy, settled here and gave the place its name.

In the 1860s it belonged to St Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery, and the buildings here were done out in Ukrainian Baroque. None of them lasted - they were demolished later. The site became a Soviet state farm in 1919 and then an observatory for the Institute of Botany under the Ukrainian Academy of Science. It's been a park since 1972 and government-designated since 1992, and the canals, water features and landscaping you see now came out of the reconstruction around that time.

One footnote most people walk past: MESM, the first Soviet computer, was built on this ground.