Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, the great-grandson of the founder of Hasidism, died in Uman in the early nineteenth century and asked to be buried here, among the graves of Jewish martyrs of an earlier massacre. His followers, the Breslov Hasidim, took to heart his call to gather at his grave for the Jewish New Year, and over generations that gathering grew into a mass pilgrimage. Each autumn, the neighborhood around the tomb fills with worshippers who have come from Israel, the United States, and far beyond, packing prayer halls and lodgings and spilling into the surrounding streets. For a city its size, it is an astonishing annual event, a religious homecoming that binds Uman to a global community most of the year invisible here.

Uman's second pilgrimage is to beauty rather than faith. On the city's northern edge lies Sofiyivka, one of the most celebrated landscape gardens in Eastern Europe, commissioned in 1796 by a Polish count as a gift for his wife and filled with waterfalls, grottoes, and ponds arranged to evoke the poems of Homer. It draws hundreds of thousands of visitors a year and ranks among the Seven Wonders of Ukraine. The two draws could hardly be more different, a solemn graveside and a romantic pleasure garden, yet together they make this unassuming city one of the country's major destinations. Founded in the seventeenth century, Uman has long stood at a crossroads of Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish history, and both of its pilgrimages grow directly from that layered past.

Away from the tomb and the garden, Uman is an ordinary and pleasant central-Ukrainian city, roughly two hundred kilometers south of Kyiv and a similar distance from Odesa, reachable by train and by the comfortable minibuses that ply the routes from the capital. It ranks around fiftieth among Ukrainian cities by population and second in its region, with art galleries and museums for those who linger between the two great sights. For most travelers, though, Uman is defined by its remarkable duality: a modest place that becomes, for a few days each year, a spiritual capital, and that keeps year-round one of the loveliest gardens ever planted on Ukrainian soil.