The story goes that an invading Khan once brought his soldiers up to the castle of Kamyanets-Podilsky. Looking across a couple hundred yard chasm separating his men from the solid-stone structure, he asked his lieutenant, "Who built this castle, soldier?"

"It is said that God did, sir," the man replied.

The Khan responded, "Then let him take it," and passed on looking for easier targets.

One can't fault the Khan's good sense. The castle in this western Ukrainian town sits on its own private cliff 100 feet tall. Two slender bridges connect it to the world around it. Castles elsewhere have to settle for being up on the top of a hill or surrounded by a piddling little moat. In contrast, the Khan's attacking troops would have faced a straight drop down the side of castle and cliff into a messy pile in the trees far below. Actually I couldn't picture Poles or Turks in this castle at all, I could only think Frodo and Strider and elves and dwarves had lived here.

I walked on the battlements, or at least what was left of them. Small shrubs and trees were doing what the invading Khan couldn't -- bringing down the fortress walls. At one place along the wall I had to be very careful to avoid a hole right in the middle of the stone walkway. One of the towers had lost its roof and was open to the sky. Leaning out through the remains of a window frame I could see down the side of the castle and into the valley, but I had to be careful not to slip backwards: The stone under my feet was weathered and cracked into thin layers like slate.

Money that's supposed to pay for the renovations that might help this situation tends to get cut off by high-level corruption, the rest siphoned off by petty corruption or pissed away in inefficiency. What's left is not enough even to pay the handful of old grandmothers who are holding down the fort. It's painful to think of this cultural heritage disintegrating, but I do have to admit a perverse kind of pleasure I took in not being weighed down by the trappings of modern tours. There were no blue handlebars fencing me in, no little yellow arrows pointing me around, and no little digital recorders telling me the sanitized history of the castle. For our tour we had some friends of Leysa's who'd grown up here to tell us all the best stories.

The castle had a dark, dismal little cell in one of the towers that was where the Ukrainian national hero Ustym Karmelyuk was imprisoned for a while. I've heard him called the Ukrainian Robin Hood, but I've heard at least two other individuals also called the same -- Ukraine's had lots of oppressive landlords to fight against. Personally, I'd rather call him the Ukrainian equivalent of the entire cast of the Great Escape. Karmelyuk got his start escaping from this cell in K-P, after being captured for agitating against Polish landlords. Still unsatisfied, he gathered 20,000 mostly poor peasants and staged uprisings against the Russian landlords as well. For those and further annoyances he was sent to Siberia... four times. I've heard he's a Siberian folk hero as well, for being nutsy and clever enough to escape that often.

Just to complete the fantastic picture, the castle has a network of secret passageways winding beneath it. Some go down into the ground and under the valley to the rest of the city, some exit right into the castle and some haven't even been mapped. When Lesya was living and studying here in K-P, she, like many of her fellow students, tried spelunking the tunnels. Her and a friend crept into a passage that has since been padlocked shut, expecting to spend a handful of minutes scaring themselves in the dark. After a kilometer of wandering about under a low ceiling, the two of them started worrying that their flashlight would run out of batteries.

There's an old folktale about a young man who fell down a natural well in these caves. His friends found him a year later, a pasty white figure wandering around blind. With this pleasant thought in mind, Lesya and her friend continued on. They didn't spot any stumbling albinos, but they did occasionally pass old shell casings and helmets, as well as various utensils. They thought these were from World War II, but in the dim beam of the flashlight they couldn't be sure. When they finally emerged, another kilometer, they found they'd wandered all the way into a neighboring village.

When we finished our tour, we walked back over the bridge to a small pub. The interior was almost black, and they had a strange chimney that seemed to be made of cast iron, with big swords and spiky appendages sticking out of it on all sides. In that black pit we had a red, meaty Georgian soup called kharcho, and Georgian-style kebabs.

Excluding myself, all the people at the table had studied in Kamyanets. For all its landmarks, the place is now a college town -- 70% of the population is under 35. The conversation thus naturally turned from national history to personal history, especially after the third or fourth vodka shot.

Most of their college stories could have happened back in the US, but there were a few exceptions. The absolute best was this gem:

A group of students got together to drink one time, and, typically, they didn't have any money for food. However, one student remembered that there was a big jar of canned meat in the teacher's room next door.

As they didn't have a key, the student attempted to climb across to the next balcony to get in. Drunk as he was he missed and fell 5 floors to the ground. After bouncing down through a tree, he wound up on the ground with nothing more than a couple bruises and a minor concussion.

Then, the old grandmother security monitor (the grandmas get all the fun jobs) decided for herself that he had not fallen, but been pushed by his obviously drug-addicted friends for not paying back the money he owed them. She told the police this story and they carted the whole group of students off to jail.

While walking through the police department after being arrested, one of the girls passed a cell containing the school dean -- in prison for accepting bribes. Being a polite student she said good evening before passing by.

The dean remained at her post in the college for another three years.

I've got to admit that the night drinking with friends was more enjoyable than the history tour, though that was not due to any weakness of the guide or the scenery. Sitting down around a table together with good friends and a couple bottles of something is a treasured Ukrainian pastime. Even more, the food, friends, and forty-proof were real. Though it was only 200 yards away, the castle seemed to have already slipped into a kind of dreamy recollection of mine.