Qualla: Uman

Uman: Introduction

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Håkan Henriksson (Narking), CC BY 3.0. Once a year, a small city in central Ukraine swells with tens of thousands of visitors from across the world, most of them men in black hats who have traveled thousands of miles to pray beside a single grave. Uman is, for much of the calendar, a quiet industrial town of modest size. But it holds one of the most important pilgrimage sites in the Hasidic Jewish world, the resting place of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, and every Rosh Hashanah his followers gather here in a swirl of prayer, song, and celebration that transforms the streets entirely.

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Image: Håkan Henriksson (Narking) | CC BY 3.0

Uman: The Rebbe's Grave

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nahoumsabban, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 hi...

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Image: Nahoumsabban | CC BY-SA 3.0

Uman: A Count's Dream Beside the River

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sofname, CC BY 4.0. 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 arran...

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Image: Sofname | CC BY 4.0

Uman: The City in Between

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Uk-Kamelot, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 fi...

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Image: Uk-Kamelot | CC BY-SA 3.0