Podolia's heart — a city of islands, the world's only musical water-fire fountain, and Pirogov's preserved body
Vinnytsia is a major regional city on the Southern Bug River in west-central Ukraine, best known for two unusual attractions: the Roshen Fountain, one of Europe's largest illuminated musical fountains built on an island in the river, and the estate and preserved body of celebrated 19th-century surgeon Nikolai Pirogov, whose corpse is maintained in a glass sarcophagus in a neo-Gothic church mausoleum. The city is also a hub of Ukraine's confectionery industry — Roshen, Ukraine's largest chocolate brand, is headquartered here.
Vinnytsia was first documented in 1363 and became an important fortified city of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The region was devastated by the Khmelnytsky Uprising (1648) and subsequent wars. In the 20th century, the city gained dark historical significance as the site of the Vinnytsia massacre: in 1943, German forces discovered a mass grave of 9,000 victims of Stalin's NKVD from 1937–38, provoking international outrage and one of the first major investigations into Soviet mass killings. Under Soviet rule Vinnytsia also hosted one of Hitler's Eastern Front headquarters (Werwolf bunker…