Sofiyivka: The River That Runs in the Dark

Your boat slides into a stone arch, and the light goes out. Granite overhead. Blackness ahead. Somewhere, water drips. The boatman says nothing. You drift like this for about five minutes. Then a white patch appears, and grows, and the boat comes out into full sun, onto wide water with a fountain in the middle.

This is Uman, in central Ukraine, and the park is called Sofiyivka. The underground river has a name: Acheron. In Greek myth, that's the river the dead were ferried across.

The tunnel is two hundred and twenty-four metres long, about two football pitches end to end. It's roughly three metres wide and three metres high. Serf labourers from the Uman region cut it and lined it by hand, at the very end of the eighteenth century. No machines.

The first question everyone asks is: what pumps the water? The fountain shoots up about sixteen metres, higher than a five-storey building. The cascades roar. The tunnel is full. So there must be a pump. And what turns the pump? There was no steam engine on the estate, and no electricity. A horse couldn't manage that jet.

Here's the answer: there were no pumps at all. One simple thing does everything, and that's height. The Upper Pond sits more than ten metres above the Lower Pond and holds about eighty thousand cubic metres. From there, cast-iron pipes carry the water down by gravity alone. To the grottoes, to the sluice, to the underground channel, to the fountain. The falling water lifts itself.

The man who worked this out was Ludwig Metzel, a Polish military engineer who lived from seventeen sixty-four to eighteen forty-eight. He was used to calculating fortifications and river crossings. Now he had a commission for an imaginary Greece, in the middle of the Ukrainian steppe.

The client was Count Stanisław Szczęsny Potocki, one of the richest magnates in the region. Building began in seventeen ninety-six. By one estimate it cost around fifteen million zlotys, a fortune at the time. And all of it was a gift for his wife.

Her name was Sofia. She was Greek, born near Constantinople in seventeen sixty. As a young girl she was sold by her own family. The Polish ambassador, Boscamp, was leaving for Warsaw. He left her an apartment, and put fifteen hundred piastres in a bank for the day she might marry. After that came a major named Witt, the commandant's son in Kamianets. Then a ball in Iași, and a second marriage. In seventeen ninety-eight, in Tulchyn, she became Countess Potocka.

The park was presented to her on her name day, in eighteen hundred and two.

Now, what makes this garden frightening. Metzel didn't design only beauty. He designed fear, and he calculated it as carefully as the flow in a pipe.

There's a grotto called the Thunder Grotto. Water is piped in, and the falling cascade booms inside a stone basin like a thunderclap, or like a lion's roar. You step into a dark niche and hear an animal that isn't there.

Then there's the Grotto of Fear and Doubt. It used to be called the Grotto of Tantalus. Above the entrance hangs a granite block weighing more than three hundred tonnes. It rests on three points, with no mortar at all. To walk under it, you have to take the engineer at his word. Uman has been shaken by earthquakes, in eighteen thirty-eight, and again in nineteen seventy-six and nineteen eighty-six. The block hasn't moved.

The rest didn't go to plan. Potocki died in eighteen hundred and five, three years after handing his wife this gift. Sofia outlived him by seventeen years and died in Berlin, of cancer. Her relationship with her stepson Yuri, almost twenty years younger than she was, became a public scandal, and it cost her her reputation.

The park changed hands too. After the Polish uprising of eighteen thirty-one, the estate was taken by the Crown. Nicholas the First gave it to his wife, Alexandra Feodorovna, and the garden was renamed Tsaritsyn. The Polish monuments were removed. The old name came back later.

Today it's a national arboretum. It covers a hundred and seventy-nine hectares, with thousands of plant species. And since nineteen eighty-five, an asteroid called Sofiyivka has been circling in the sky.

Metzel worked out the drop in height so well that the water has been running by itself for a third century now. The marriage this whole park was built for lasted seven years.

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