JC-Travel Ukraine, a Kharkiv-based company, has a new service to help foreigners with Ukrainian roots get a better sense of their heritage, including searching for long-lost relatives. Given that the country has experienced four waves of emigration since the late 19th century, the world has plenty of curious tourists of Ukrainian origin.
“The number of foreigners with family roots in Ukraine who want to visit the country to have a better sense of where they come from increases each year,” according to the company’s news release. While definitely a niche service, the travel bureau has catered to more than a dozen lineage-seeking clients already.
Its first client, Paul Kuprionas, visited in 2011. He traveled from the U.S. to Chernivtsi, a western Ukrainian city where his great-grandparents are from. All he knew was the name of the city, which is also the birthplace of Mila Kunis, an American actress. “Since then we began to ask all our foreign clients about the purpose of their visit to see if they’re just visiting or in search of their family roots,” said Yulia Kulyk, co-owner of JC-Travel.
A five-day package, which includes an interpreter, transportation and accommodations, starts at $500, but prices vary based on duration of stay and traveler preferences.
Meanwhile, an 11-day tour to Kyiv, Odesa, Poltava and other cities for first time visitors runs as much as $1,400 per person. An eight-day trip to western Ukraine goes for $925. By comparison, the local market price for a modest 10-day vacation in the Carpathian Mountains costs $240 per person.
Clients from the U.S. and Canada are the substance of the company’s client base where some two million members of the world’s Ukrainian diaspora of six and a half million people is located. It is the world’s fifth largest migrant group, according to the International Organization for Migration.
However, in March the travel bureau serviced its first Latin American client – Sergio Porter, president and CEO of IT College in Argentina’s Buenos Aires. “The recent events on Maidan certainly made quite a big impression on me. The rage about the lifestyle of (ex-President Viktor) Yanukovych was also huge,” he says. “But I liked the people, they are very friendly. I loved their country much despite the difficult times.”
Porter didn’t know much about his family. He knew that his relatives originally lived in Dnipropetrovsk, a city in central Ukraine formerly called Ekaterinoslav in Tsarist Russia, and immigrated to Argentina in the early 1900’s. Possessing the address of the family house and the names of relatives, he decided it would be a good idea to smell Dnipropetrovsk’s air. “I wanted to have a personal experience about the country and the people, and I got it,” Porter said.
“People were very dedicated. We spent countless hours talking about a wide range of subjects, which was crucial for creating a feeling of closeness to Ukraine that exceeded my expectations,” he added.
While members of the Ukrainian diaspora come to see the places where their relatives once lived, tourists from Germany and the Netherlands visit to learn more about their descendants who died here during World War II. Leo Hoeks of the Netherlands came to find more about his uncle Hendrik Hoeks, who was a Waffen SS soldier in the German army and who was killed on Ukrainian territory at the age of 22.
“We have found out almost everything – the place where he was wounded, the village where he stayed in a hospital, where he was taken by (Soviet) soldiers, where he was buried and reburied. His story was filmed in a documentary,” JC-Travel Ukraine’s Kulyk said.
Hoeks says he could never get enough information about his uncle from his family members. “We actually never talked about that,” he said.
Now he had a chance to bring flowers to his relative’s grave in Krysino, a village in Kharkiv Oblast. “My uncle who was killed was a Dutchman who opted for the German army. Wrong choice at that time,” the nephew admits.
“There are many more people in the Netherlands who lost their relatives in Ukraine during World War II and now recently after the MH17 accident,” Hoeks added.
Kyle and Becky Fortney from Wisconsin adopted a 1-year old Ukrainian girl in 2004 and later came to Ukraine with the assistance of JC Travel to find their daughter’s brothers and sisters. Moreover, the child they adopted was severely wounded after her birth in an accidental fire, so they wanted to learn more.
“They received a lot of information about the girl’s life in Ukraine and organized a lot of meetings with people from the orphanage, with her relatives. It was too emotional for me,” Kulyk said with a sigh.
Kyiv Post staff writer Iana Koretska can be reached at [email protected].
