Boryslav. This is where oil is born.

A city that sits right on top of oil fields? Where oil was extracted when the rest of the world didn’t even know about it yet? Oil pumps right in a city park? A church that preserves one of the largest collections of holy relics? All this is a city that not even many people who live nearby know about. Meet Borislav.

The town, which is located near Drohobych, was founded in 1387, and already in the middle of the XIX century the town became a world-famous center of oil, gas and ozokerite production.

For example, the Boryslav deposit of ozokerite, discovered in 1854, is one of the richest deposits of this mineral. It was this ozokerite that was used in 1857-1858 to insulate the first transatlantic telegraph cable laid from Ireland to Newfoundland. Unfortunately, in September 1858, the cable “failed”, presumably due to poor insulation.

My acquaintance with this town started from the square, where I dropped off the bus that brought me from neighboring Truskavets. Just 5 minutes of the road, a few hryvnias… And I am already in another world…. There is no trace left of the glossy tourist Truskavets. There is life here. Life on oil.

The first thing one notices here is a sense of a certain hopelessness and despair. I don’t know why, but this city gave me a feeling of hopelessness. Although I will soon go to Stebnyk and I will still remember Boryslav warmly. But for now, I started exploring this small town. I was amused by the advertisements for renting out the buildings of a state institution.

A little farther on you can see a rather tidy building. It turned out to be a house of prayer. It belongs to a Baptist church. Later on I will find more buildings of this kind in this town, which will explain to me the presence of a large number of children.

I was honestly scared at first. We got off the bus confused and stared at the streets. There were kids on them. There were kids everywhere! Somewhere there was even a suspicion that they have criminal penalties for those who go out on the streets with less than two offspring. As I said, there was a quick explanation for this – a large Baptist congregation. They encourage having more than one child, encourage multiple children, and the congregation has strong support from its members.

At the same time, you have to look carefully around. There are many different houses from the Austro-Hungarian and Polish times. The architecture is interesting. There are still some scraps of posters, advertisements and signs from a century ago in Polish on the walls.

However, the city still leaves an oppressive impression. Take Drohobych, for example. Despite all the problems, they try to keep it clean and people’s desire to live there gets additional motivation. What do we see here? Do we need to ask why most of the locals go to work abroad, in Spain, Portugal and Italy?

For example, here’s a little park. It is supposed to be a green place where you can sit, think about life, walk with children, of which there are a huge number in the city. However, next to the inoperative traffic light you can see only garbage, overturned trash cans and the main character of the photo – a bench.

That’s a bench. No, it wasn’t destroyed by vandals the day before I arrived. It’s just overgrown with shrubbery. I mean, these things have been standing here lonely for five years, and no one has the brains and courage to come here with a couple of boards, a hammer and a dozen nails. No men to paint it. Girls don’t want to take a sapka and weed the grass nearby. But without a penny of investment, just digging in the yard and attics, if there were straight hands and desire of a dozen people, there would be a great green corner with a bench, a beautiful grass and a place for walking children.

Although, what is there to say, if even the local restaurant with quite a good entourage stands abandoned.

And on the way, past the market and the local “intellectuals” looking unhealthily at my camera, I came across a kindergarten that caused me genuine horror. It is called “Teremok”, but it looks much less welcoming. To be honest, the unhappy smile on my face was not out of schadenfreude….. Why does it feel creepy, like I’m down in the V Fort?

But very well-maintained statues of the Virgin Mary. As everywhere in western Ukraine, there are many of them. They can be found near churches, in the courtyard of private houses, on the main street and in such nooks and crannies, where even a local resident rarely sets foot. I must say, they bring variety to the gray landscapes….

I was also quite impressed by the use of land near apartment buildings as vegetable gardens. Sorry, but in the city, under the house, beds with cucumbers and cabbage are the last thing I expected to see. However, that’s not a surprise to anyone here. They’ve got worse things to do.

We go out to the more important streets of the city. Girls and mothers with strollers and children rush to the meeting. The population of the city is only 38.4 thousand people. Most of them look surprised at a tourist with a camera – this is not a tourist place and crowds of travelers are not noticed here (so, I found only one photo report on this city in the Internet). But the girls here are still beautiful.

In general, the city cannot be called irreplaceable in terms of building a travel itinerary. And it’s not even about the very “high-quality” road surfaces and pedestrian zones, clearly taken from some cheap horror movie.

Take at least most of the monuments and memorials. They are obscure and abandoned. For example, this pole. I wandered around it for a few minutes and was 100% sure that it was a monument to some beekeepers or just a monument to honeycombs. It did not evoke any other associations. It turned out to be a monument to the soldiers of the Second World War.

It looks especially sad from the other side, opposite the makeshift market. The 90’s-style street trading of vegetables has somehow become quite depressing. Although, if the vegetables are good, why not? I was spoiled by the indoor market in Truskavets, where I lived then.

But still, I eventually found, and quite by accident, a place worth visiting if you’re in the neighborhood. We wandered around for the second day and thought that we would not find anything worth seeing (although there is plenty of room for lovers of abandoned buildings, factories and plants). And then we came across St. Anne’s Church. At first it seemed to be an ordinary Catholic church, slightly different in its luxurious decoration, but soon attention was attracted by the Masonic symbols on it.

Inside is no less interesting: the beautiful decoration is not so much even striking. as the huge number of holy relics. There will be a separate article about this temple, in which I will try to shed some light on its history for my readers.

Nearby, at the crossroads, there is a monument to those who died in one of the city’s regular disasters. For example, in the place of this monument there used to be a multi-storey building, which exploded as a result of gas penetration into the basement. This tragedy took place in 1972. But so far the situation has not been improved.

Boryslav is the only city on the planet that is located on the oil fields. Where its extraction takes place. Because of this, despite the fact that it is among the top 10 greenest cities in Ukraine, people live here like on a powder keg. The constant formation of gas leads to explosions, oil pollutes the water…. At any minute another ecological catastrophe could happen.

Even more dangerous are the cavities that were formed as a result of centuries of oil extraction without proper calculations and care for local residents and the city itself.

The city’s news reports are literally full of such troubles. Just 10 days before our visit, there was another explosion in the city. It was caused by a mine that was liquidated in 1945 (it was drilled in 1912), and the victims were three schoolchildren. Thank God, as far as I know, all survived, but were severely injured.

It is not a problem to find an oil pump here and observe how it works. Almost all of them have been privatized, and one can find dozens of such “Petroviches” around the city (in public parks, on the outskirts and in yards, in cemeteries and near water bodies).

If I had a little more experience in photography, I would have shown the “blown up” photo from a different angle, where several moms with strollers are walking by the oil pump #2016.

The problem of location of monuments in a small town was solved simply here. Opposite the post office building there is a small square, where monuments to the liquidators of the Chernobyl accident and warriors-internationalists, soldiers of the Red Army and others are nestled in a small space.

That concludes my account of this town. Nice, but very sad. For some reason, in my opinion, the atmosphere is best conveyed by this photo, where I managed to capture the monument to Ivan Franko. Pay attention to the local resident, who thoughtfully, in the same pose froze on his balcony and stares into the distance.

Ivan Franko is on the main square for a reason. It was he who “glorified” the town in the world literature, thanks to his novel “Borislav Laughs”. Yes, yes, it was about this town of Boryslav, near Drohobych, that Franko wrote his novel.

The city could be cleaned up and made luxurious. You just have to want to. To overcome laziness and at least – to remove the garbage, which is piled near the center.

And then Boryslav will really laugh. Walking distance from expensive Truskavets will attract here thousands of people who have to be regularly treated in the neighboring health resort, but do not have so much money to live there. A lot of believers will go to churches and churches, of which there are plenty. And tourists like me will come for the photo “look how oil is extracted in the center of the city!”. And it’s not hard. If only there was a desire…

Thank you Boryslav for your hospitality!