Uman is a city with a double soul. On one hand, it is home to Sofíyivka park, one of the most beautiful landscape gardens in Eastern Europe: a romantic paradise of more than 150 hectares, with lakes, waterfalls, grottoes, islands and classical pavilions, created in the late 18th century by a Polish aristocrat as a gift of love for his wife. On the other, it is the largest centre of Hasidic pilgrimage on the planet: every Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah), tens of thousands of Hasidic Jews from all over the world travel to Uman to pray at the tomb of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, founder of Breslov Hasidism, who died here in 1810.
Important: since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine has been at war and under martial law. For now, Uman is not a safe tourist destination: there are air-raid alerts and a risk of missile and drone attacks — the city has in fact been hit by strikes that killed civilians —, a night-time curfew is in force, and governments, including Argentina's, advise against travelling to the country. This guide is informative and cultural, meant to help you get to know Uman, its park and its unique pilgrimage tradition, and to plan a visit when security conditions allow, without making light of an ongoing war.
With those warnings in mind, this guide covers the essential Uman: the incomparable Sofíyivka park, the neighbourhood and synagogue around Rabbi Nachman's tomb, and the phenomenon of the Hasidic pilgrimage that makes this city unique. Many prices, opening hours and services are currently disrupted by the war — and, around Rosh Hashanah, by extremely high demand —, so every detail should be reconfirmed before any future trip.
Uman began as a border fortress on lands that were once part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and in the 18th century it belonged to the powerful magnate family of the Potockis. In 1768 it was the scene of the Uman massacre, one of the bloodiest episodes of the Koliivshchyna Cossack-peasant uprising, in which thousands of people died, many of them Jews and Poles. Shortly afterwards, around 1796, Count Stanisław Szczęsny Potocki had Sofíyivka park created in honour of his wife Zofia. In 1810 Rabbi Nachman of Breslov died and was buried in Uman, which turned the city into a centre of Hasidic pilgrimage. After the partitions of Poland it passed to the Russian Empire, and in the 20th century it lived through the Revolution, the Holocaust — which wiped out its local Jewish community — and the Soviet era. Since 1991 it has been part of independent Ukraine. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The historic heart of Ukraine: Kyiv, the thousand-year-old “mother of Rus' cities” on the Dnieper; the Chernobyl exclusion zone; Uman, the city of Hasidic pilgrims; and Poltava, site of the battle that changed Eastern Europe.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Uman began the way so many towns in this part of Ukraine did: as a fortified outpost in a frontier land, fought over for centuries by rival powers. First mentioned in the 17th century, it lay in the historical region of Podolia, on the eastern edge of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, an area exposed to raids by Tatars, Cossacks and Ottomans. Being on the frontier shaped its fate: again and again it was the setting for wars and uprisings.
In the 18th century, Uman and its vast lands passed to one of the most powerful families of the Polish nobility: the Potockis, magnates who owned immense estates and wielded almost sovereign power over their domains. Under their rule, the town grew into the administrative and commercial centre of a rich farming region. Its people were Orthodox Ukrainian peasants, Catholic Polish nobles and administrators, and a large Jewish community working in trade and crafts.
That social mix created deep tensions: a Ukrainian Orthodox peasant majority under a Polish Catholic elite, with Jews often in the middle as leaseholders and estate managers. Fed by religious and social conflict, those tensions would explode in 1768 in one of the bloodiest episodes in the region's history.
In 1768, built-up social, religious and national tensions exploded in the Koliivshchyna, a violent uprising of Orthodox Ukrainian peasants and Cossacks (the 'haidamaky') against the rule of the Catholic Polish nobility and its institutions. The revolt was driven by real grievances and by religious conflict between Orthodox, Catholics and Uniates, and it spread across the region with extreme brutality.
As a Potocki stronghold and a refuge for the Polish and Jewish population of the surrounding area, Uman became the scene of the most tragic episode. When the rebels, led by Maksym Zaliznyak and Ivan Gonta, took the town, a horrific slaughter followed: thousands of people, Poles and Jews, including women and children who had sought refuge there, were killed within a few days. It is remembered as the Uman massacre, one of the bloodiest episodes in the history of Ukraine at that time.
Russian and Polish troops eventually crushed the uprising harshly, and its leaders were executed cruelly. The Koliivshchyna left a deep wound and a contested memory: Ukrainian national tradition has sometimes read it as a peasant liberation revolt, while for the Polish and Jewish communities it was a catastrophe. That bloodshed left its mark on the town.
Just a few decades after the tragedy of 1768, Uman saw the birth of its great masterpiece. Around 1796, Count Stanisław Szczęsny Potocki, one of the richest aristocrats in the region, had a lavish landscape park created on the edge of town, in a valley crossed by a river. He meant it as a monumental gift of love for his wife, the beautiful Zofia (Sophia) de Witt, who was of Greek origin, and the park was named Sofiyivka in her honour.
The design was entrusted to the military engineer Ludwik Metzel, who turned the rugged terrain into a dreamlike landscape following the rules of the romantic 'English' garden of the time, full of references to Greek mythology. Earth was moved, water was dammed to create lakes and waterfalls, grottoes and an underground river were dug, and pavilions, columns, obelisks and an Island of Love were built. The result was one of the most admired gardens in Eastern Europe, a poem made of water, stone and greenery.
The park changed hands over time. It passed to the Russian state, which renamed it for a while, but it survived wars and regimes and has come down to us as Uman's great symbol. Now a national botanical garden of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, it is one of the most visited parks in the country and a testament to the artistic refinement of the late 18th century.
While Sofiyivka was making Uman more beautiful, the town was also becoming central to the Jewish world for a very different reason. In 1810, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (Nachman of Bratslav), one of the most original and charismatic figures of Hasidism, arrived in Uman gravely ill with tuberculosis. A great-grandson of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the Hasidic movement, Nachman had developed his own teaching, centred on joy, simple faith, personal and intimate prayer ('hitbodedut') and overcoming despair.
Nachman deliberately chose Uman as the place to die. The town held the memory of the Jews massacred in 1768, and he wanted to be buried alongside those martyrs. He died that same year, 1810, at the age of 38, and was buried in the old Jewish cemetery. Before he died, according to his followers' tradition, he promised to intercede for anyone who came to pray at his grave, and he asked in particular that they gather there on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
That promise gave rise to one of the most unusual religious traditions in the world. From the very year after his death, his disciples began making the pilgrimage to Uman every Rosh Hashanah. They were the Breslov Hasidim, a movement set apart by never naming a successor as its leader and keeping Nachman himself as its eternal 'rebbe'. Over the years the pilgrimage grew until, in the 21st century, it became a phenomenon involving tens of thousands of people.
After the partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th century, Uman became part of the Russian Empire, inside the 'Pale of Settlement' where Jews were forced to live. The town kept a large and lively Jewish community, living alongside the Ukrainian majority and Polish and Russian minorities. The 20th century, however, brought one catastrophe after another.
The Russian Revolution and the civil war (1917-1921) unleashed a wave of violence and pogroms across the region that hit Ukraine's Jewish communities hard, Uman's included. Then came the Soviet years, with forced collectivisation and the Holodomor, the famine of 1932-1933 that devastated the Ukrainian countryside. With the Second World War came the greatest tragedy for Uman's Jewish community: after the German occupation in 1941, almost the entire Jewish population of the town was murdered in mass shootings, as part of the Holocaust in Ukraine. Centuries of Jewish life in Uman were wiped out.
In the Soviet era, the pilgrimage to Rabbi Nachman's grave became almost impossible: borders were closed, religion was repressed, and only a few Jews managed to reach the site in secret, which the authorities even altered. The regime turned Uman into just another Soviet provincial town, with its industry and its housing blocks, while its double heritage, the romantic park and the Hasidic shrine, survived and waited for better times.
Ukraine's independence in 1991 transformed Uman once again. With borders open and religious freedom restored, the pilgrimage to Rabbi Nachman's grave revived and grew year after year into a mass phenomenon. From a brave few in Soviet times it grew to tens of thousands of pilgrims every Rosh Hashanah, mainly from Israel and the United States. A large synagogue was built around the shrine, and a permanent Jewish community even took root, with kosher shops and services, bringing new life to Jewish life in the town on a scale never seen before.
At the same time, Sofiyivka Park established itself as one of Ukraine's best-loved tourist destinations, drawing families, school groups and travellers from all over the country. Uman thus led a double life: a global pilgrimage town and a gem of Ukrainian landscape tourism, linked by the same history.
Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022 also hit Uman. Although it is far from the front line, the town has suffered missile strikes: in April 2023, a Russian strike destroyed an apartment building and killed dozens of civilians, including children, one of the deadliest attacks of that period. Even so, defying official warnings and the risks, thousands of pilgrims have kept coming to Uman for Rosh Hashanah in wartime too, an extraordinary testament to faith. This guide is offered with respect for that devotion and for a town that, between the beauty of its park and the memory of its tragedies, embodies like few others the intertwined history of Ukraine and the Jewish people.
