Historical Reserve Kamyana Mohyla (meaning Stone Grave in Ukrainian) is located about 100 km to the South from Zaporizhzhia near village Myrne on the picturesque banks of the Molochna River. Often called the Ukrainian Stonehenge, Kamyana Mohyla has been an unsolved mystery located amid vast Ukrainian steppes. 35-feet tall boulders are scattered around the mound compassing an area of 3000 square meters.
There are a lot of ancient legends about Kamyana Mohyla origin, but scientists believe that ‘stone island’ is around 14 million years old, which makes it the oldest archeological and cultural monument in Ukraine! Scientists these days think that about 20 thousand years ago prehistoric people found the mound to be a good shelter and since then it has been used by Scythians, Cimmerians, Goths, Huns and Cumans as a shrine, and in later times, as late as the tenth-twelfth centuries AD, it was still regularly visited. During excavations, archeologists found among the piles of stones over sixty grottos, manholes, caves, and even a pagan sanctuary! But the main mystery of Kamyana Mohyla are thousands of petroglyphs and pictures engraved on the walls of its caves. After decades of expeditions archeologists agree that thousands of petroglyphs and pictures in Kamyana Mohyla must have been created over a very long stretch of time — the earliest date back to the twenty-second millennium BC, and the latest ones back to twelfth century AD.
Visitors are welcome to review the art and artifacts discovered in Kamyana Mohyla during those archeological expeditions at the local museum located on the northern side of the historical reserve. Among the artifacts you can find all kinds of implements and weapons used by the prehistoric people, earthenware and petroglyphs.