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The regional center has never seen anything like this: seven tour groups are simultaneously leisurely strolling along the city’s central street, looking at historical buildings and listening to lively stories from tour guides. This is not a tourist boom or a mass influx of tourists – it is the graduation of students from a joint project of the Department of Culture and Tourism of the Khmelnytskyi City Council and the Khmelnytskyi Charitable Foundation “Hesed Besht”. The “Guide School”, which is part of the “50 Steps That Will Change the City” program, has been working for a whole month to enrich the city community with qualified tour guides.
According to the mentor of the "Guide School" project, Information Manager of the Khmelnytskyi Charitable Foundation "Hesed Besht" Vyacheslav Nagnybida, the training of tour guides is an extremely important thing. There are many good historians and local lore experts in Khmelnytskyi who know history and facts perfectly, but a good historian and a good guide are somewhat different things. The project participants were taught the basics of conducting walking tours and bus tours, methods of working with a group, providing information, and using additional opportunities, such as handouts or involving local institutions in the usual routes. After all, everything is important for a real guide: from appearance to the set of his "excursion case."
The project participants were mainly employees of educational and cultural institutions. Some already had experience in conducting excursions, but most learned from scratch. During the month of training, the project participants worked in the museum premises of the Thiya Community Center and went out into the city, traveled in the Bus City Tour excursion bus, observed the work of future (at that time) colleagues and compiled their own routes and texts for excursions. The theoretical basis was the works of eminent historians and local historians of our city, highly specialized publications that describe individual topics of the development of the area from the time of Ploskyrovets (1431) to modern Khmelnytskyi.
The graduation of the “School of Guides” took place in accordance with the project’s goal. At 2:00 p.m., both guides and specially invited listeners gathered at the site near “Children’s World.” They were employees of various departments of the Khmelnytskyi City Council, who were specially invited as the first impartial excursionists. To maintain the intrigue, the graduates did not know until the last moment who they would be walking around the city with today. The signal for the start was the melody from the song “Proskurivsky Waltz,” which is played every hour by the clock on the tower of the “Planeta” cinema.
The synchronous excursion for seven groups lasted about forty minutes. During this time, people covered the distance from the "Children's World" to the T. G. Shevchenko Cinema, stopping at important historical buildings. This dispels the beliefs of many skeptics that there is nothing to see in our city: in general, you can walk along Proskurivska Street alone for about two hours! At the final point of the route, the project organizers were already waiting for people.
In the presence of the excursionists who had just witnessed the "thesis works", certificates of successful training were presented by the Head of the Department of Culture and Tourism of the Khmelnytskyi City Council Artem Romasyukov and the Director of the Khmelnytskyi Charitable Foundation "Hesed Besht", Honored Worker of the Social Sphere of Ukraine Ihor Ratushny. Artem Yevgenyevich congratulated the graduates and thanked the listeners, and also presented the graduates with T-shirts with the symbols of the city of Khmelnytskyi, which in the future will become a characteristic distinguishing feature in the activities of guides.
Tourism development is a strategic direction for Khmelnytskyi, so increasing the number of qualified guides will only benefit. There are an incredible number of interesting places in our city that most Khmelnytskyi residents do not know about, so cooperation between the authorities and the community, exemplified by the “Guide School”, benefits all citizens and improves the culture of our society.
