Soroptimist Satin Season in Crimea

Exclusive: Soroptimist Satin Season
in Crimea

Satin Season in Crimea is the unique International Project which SI Club of Dnepropetrovsk started in 2001. Since that time the 10-day tour was successfully repeated every two years. Guests of three SI Federations visited our country. Soroptimists , their relatives and friends were able to enjoy the history and culture of our country, old and new towns, Black Sea with its wonders and Ukrainian hospitality.

Last autumn SI Club of Dnepropetrovsk became ten years old. To celebrate the great club anniversary we decided to combine it with our fifth tour «Soroptimist Satin Season in the Crimea», which takes place from September 5 to September 12, 2009. That meant there were two important reasons for Soroptimists to visit our country and to open the most famous and beautiful places of Ukraine.

For our 16 guests who came to Ukraine from Denmark, Germany, Luxemburg, Great Britain and Switzerland it was also an opportunity to help the Club make the fundraising for its Projects “Give the Child a Chance” and “Clean water for children in the orphanage” to help disable children in the city orphanage.

Together with foreign guests sisters from three Ukrainian SI clubs (Simferopol, Kiev and Chernovtsy) attended our anniversary. In Dnepropetrovsk all guests could visit the orphanage and see all the changes made by our projects. The sanitary room for girls was inaugurated at the moment. In the evening the participants of the tour, sisters from Ukrainian clubs and sisters from SI club of Dnepropetrovsk enjoyed a gala-dinner with meals of different parts of Ukraine and delicious Ukrainian wines. A lot of good words said by our guests made us happy with our club work and encouraged our further activity.

During the next day the guests visited the city Historical museum and the old park which was founded by count Potyomkin, favourite of tsarina Catherine II. For two days they enjoyed the sightseeing of Dnepropetrovsk and its suburbs. They visited the Cossack village Galushkovka and the village Petrykivka famous for its unique paintings.

Then accompanied by two Soroptimists of our club the group went to one of the most beautiful places in the world : the Crimean Peninsula. We stayed in Yalta, Ukrainian Riviera, in the modern hotel “Bristol”.

And the next four days we had the exciting visits to the world-wide known Palaces of tsars Romanovs – the Livadian Residence, famous also for being the place of Yaltian Conference of the Great Three, and the Palace of Alexander II in Massandra. We were elevated on the Mountain Ai-Petri by a special cable car where the whole group in spite the fact that some guests were above 75 went to the very top and could see the sea beaches from the height of 1234 m. We enjoyed Crimean wines and attended the Nikita Botanical Gardens where the rich collections of subtropical plants are gathered. September warm weather which gave the name “Satin” to our tour allowed to swim and sunburn at the Black Sea beaches. And some of our «surprises» made the vacation definitely bright. Visit to Sebastopol and its famous Panorama, looking at the very old places where Greeks lived centuries ago in Chersones, visiting park in Gurzuf was the great experience for everybody. The farewell party with Simferopol Soroptimists will closed the tour and made it unforgettable for all of us.

In total since 2001 more than one hundred guests (Soroptimists, their families and friends) from France, Holland, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Luxemburg, from Great Britain and the United States of America took part in this tour.