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A nice panorama of downtown Horlivka (Gorlovka) |
I Caught a Travel Bug
Traveling became my passion in my student's years in Horlivka.
I was a student of
the English Faculty of Horlivka State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages from 1977 till 1982.
At that time nobody called the city
Horlivka , everybody said in Russian:
Gorlovka.
They say he who had studied for five years in Horlivka became a city resident. I asked myself if I could call myself a local and my answer was negative. I did not visit too many places in the city to have it at my fingertips. Perhaps I spent too much time at my homework.
So I had to rediscover Horlivka during my two visits after my graduation: in 2002 and in 2009.
1779 is the foundation year of Horlivka. The city is called after an outstanding Russian mining engineer Peter Gorlov (1839-1915). He was commissioned to the construction of Kursk-Kharkiv-Azov railway and designed many coalmines. The thankful residents of Horlivka erected a monument to Peter Gorlov in Victory Avenue in 1999.
The city area is 422,000 square kilometers.
It is divided into three administrative districts: Central City District, Kalinin District and Nikitov Dostrict.
The settlements of Golmovsky, Zaytsevo, Panteleymonovka and the villages of Ozerianovka and Gladossovo are incorporated into the city area.
About 300,000 residents live in Horlivka now.
The city has three railway stations, more than 1,500 streets, avenues, boulevards and lanes.
Horlivka means to me a lot of nice memories of my youth.
We studied the culture of the English-speaking countries, but could not even dream of visiting them. We had to travel without seeing most of the time, but I wanted to learn the habits and ways of those countries not only from textbooks, but also from TV, radio, newspapers and magazines.
Our Communist textbooks where every word had been approved "from above" did not satisfy our thirst for knowledge and experience and we sought other ways to develop our skills and ideas.
My friends and I enjoyed listening to the VOA ("Voice of America") "Special English" programs after we had installed an extended SW antenna into an old radio set in our room in the dormitory where we lived.
It was very interesting and exciting to get the first-hand knowledge from native speakers over the radio, especially in the times of the information vacuum in our country.
The videos were very rare in those days and we got the feeling of the foreign culture through music. We listened to songs and learnt by heart the songs of "Queen", "ABBA", "Beatles," "Pink Floyd", "Boney-M" and others.
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