Things to Do in Ukraine in November

Lviv's coffee culture is older than most of what gets called coffee culture in Europe. November is when it makes the most sense. The cold pushes you inside. The wood-panelled rooms of Svit Kavy off Katedralna Square or the cellar tables at Kava Pid Klepsydroyu fog up the windows. The smell of roasting beans on Virmenska Street is sharper in cold air than in summer. Pair this with the Lviv Chocolate Manufacture on Serbska, the cinnamon-makivnyk bakeries around Rynok, and the Armenian Cathedral around the corner. You have a self-guided day that works regardless of weather.

The Kyiv metro doubles as the deepest functional shelter system in Europe. That has a strange dignity in November of a war year. Arsenalna at 105 m (344 ft) below ground is the world's deepest station. The Soviet-era mosaics at Zoloti Vorota and Universytet repay a slow look. Pair it with the Mystetskyi Arsenal complex on Lavrska, the Khanenko Museum's icon collection on Tereshchenkivska, and the National Art Museum off European Square. All indoors. All walkable from each other. All built for raw 5°C (41°F) days.

The high Carpathians get their first serious snow in November and the ski season has not opened. This is exactly why it is a good time for the foothill villages, Yaremche, Vorokhta, the wooden-church circuit around Kosiv, without the winter crowds or the summer hiking traffic. The Hutsul villages smell of woodsmoke and smoked cheese (budz and vurda from the polonyna pastures, sold at roadside stands). The Probiy waterfall in Yaremche has dramatic flow from autumn rain. The train from Lviv to Ivano-Frankivsk runs through landscape that looks like a 19th-century painting in flat November light.

November is when Ukrainian markets pay off. Bessarabsky in central Kyiv, the round 1912 art-nouveau hall on Khreshchatyk, and Halytsky in Lviv load up on autumn pickles. Fermented cabbage with cranberries, salt-cured tomatoes still slightly green, garlic in brine, dill stems pickled whole. The November-only smoked plums and dried mushrooms from the Polissia forests sit right beside them. Vendors will let you taste. The honey rows hold buckwheat honey, dark and almost molasses-like, a different product from the pale summer linden honey.

Odesa is bombed regularly. Visiting demands a serious risk assessment. Travellers who decide to go will find November the month the city feels most itself. The summer-resort crowds have vanished. The Black Sea rolls grey and choppy off Lanzheron. The Opera House, the 1887 Fellner and Helmer building and one of the finest in Europe, runs its main season with affordable rear-stalls seats. Privoz Market on Privoznaya stays hot through November with the late catch. Black Sea bullhead, smoked mackerel, brined feta from the surrounding steppe villages.

Chernivtsi gets overlooked by first-time visitors. That is a mistake in November. The former Austro-Hungarian university, a UNESCO site and the red-brick Residence of Bukovinian and Dalmatian Metropolitans, photographs better in bare-tree weather than in summer green. The Habsburg-era centre around Olha Kobylyanska Street is walkable in under an hour. The city sits far enough west to feel materially safer than the central oblasts. The Jewish heritage circuit through the former shtetl quarter is a sober, important counterweight to the architectural prettiness.