Metravel city quest
City Luninets: free walking route “Cycling quest from Luninets: Lake Beloye and Maly Lunin” along the sights. 8 points. Approximately 6 h. Quests and legends
Luninets has a legend about its own name. People say that a lookout post once stood on a hill called Sleepy Hill: when the sentries spotted an enemy, they lit signal fires. The local word for what the fire did was “лунал” — and that, so the story goes, is how the name arose. There is also a story about the “лунь”, the name for an owl in the Polesie dialect. Scholars shrug, but the legends live on.
This route is a journey to the origins: through a village owned for two hundred years by the monks of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, past a church demolished and rebuilt, to a lake with white water — and to Maly Lunin, the village that gave the future town its name in 1449.
This is a substantial route: around 40 kilometres, a full day of cycling, with eight stops. The roads are flat Polesie roads.
Before you start: 1) Check your bicycle and bring water and a snack — there will be a long break with shops in Bostyn, halfway along. 2) On the main road, keep to the right-hand edge and switch on your rear light. 3) You do not have to pedal back: a diesel train runs to Luninets from the small station at Lovcha (three kilometres from the final stop). Check the timetable at rw.by beforehand. If you get tired earlier, after the lake you can return to Bostyn and leave from Bastyn station.
Saddle up — and head northwest, towards the white water!
The route points in order — what these places are and why they are interesting. Tasks and answers stay inside the quest.
The first eight kilometres are behind you — you are in Melesnitsa, a quiet Polesie village. Do not rush to pedal on: this place has quite a history.
Bostyn greets you with a church that has had a difficult history. The first Church of Saint Paraskeva Friday was built here in 1750 by the nobleman Iosif Shchitt — from the same Shchitt family said to have hosted Adam Mickiewicz in Kozhan-Gorodok.
Half the journey is behind you — it is time for a proper break. There are several village shops in central Bostyn: water, ice cream, something to have with tea.
The forest road has brought you to the lake — and the first thing to greet you is not a beach, but a modest monument beside the road.
Here it is, your reward for thirty kilometres of pedalling — Lake Beloye. Sandy shores, pines right down to the water, a recreation area with guest cottages.
Walk a little further along the shore, away from the beach — to where the pines stand right above the water. Now we reveal the answer: Lake Beloye is up to seventeen metres deep.
Ten kilometres south — and you are in Lunin, the village where everything began. When scribes first mentioned the future district centre in 1449, they called it “Maly Lunin”, or Little Lunin — a small offshoot settlement beside this very village.
The final three kilometres — and you are at Lovcha halt, beside the same railway with which Luninets itself and your day both began. The circle is complete: in the morning you set off from a junction station, and in the evening you wait for the diesel train at a quiet halt among the fields.
This route is part of Metravel city quests. Below are the other quests in this city and cities with quests nearby.