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Food and traditions

Sumy was called the sugar capital, and the city still puts up monuments to sugar cubes and little sweet-tooths. There is also a distillery from 1897 and a round market that locals call the 'Daisy'.

Since 1869

The sugar capital

Ivan Kharytonenko built a sugar refinery in Sumy in 1869; his son Pavlo inherited seven sugar mills and the refinery. By the early 20th century Pavlo's capital in the trading house topped 15 million roubles, which paid for the mansions, cathedrals and cadet school he gave the city.

In the late 1980s the refinery, then called Chervonozoriany, turned out 290–300 thousand tonnes of pressed sugar a year and was among the largest in Europe. It closed in 2008, and only ruins remain.

Sugar is remembered in the centre: the Ivan Kharytonenko monument (1899, recreated 1996), a sugar cube opposite it (2010) and the bronze 'Sweet Tooths' on Voskresenska St (2007), a boy eating sugar straight from the sack.

The buildings of the Pavlivka refinery that Ivan Kharytonenko founded in 1869
The buildings of the Pavlivka refinery that Ivan Kharytonenko founded in 1869. By estimates it produced up to 17% of the Russian Empire's sugar, earning Sumy the nickname "sugar capital". Only ruins remain, recalled by the sugar-cube monument on Pokrovska Square.Photo: Віктор Полянко, CC BY-SA 4.0
The monument to Ivan Kharytonenko on Pokrovska Square, the patron who built a hospital, an almshouse and the cadet school and left money for the city's education
The monument to Ivan Kharytonenko on Pokrovska Square, the patron who built a hospital, an almshouse and the cadet school and left money for the city's education. The present 1996 figure repeats the 1899 original destroyed by the Bolsheviks.Photo: Андрій Мозговий, CC BY-SA 4.0
The 'Sweet Tooths' sculpture, a nod to the city's sugar past.
The 'Sweet Tooths' sculpture, a nod to the city's sugar past.Photo: Oleh Kushch, CC BY-SA 4.0

Made in Sumy

Producers

Horobyna

The distillery traces its history to an excise patent of 12 July 1897: state wine warehouse No. 7 was built in Sumy in 1896 and made vodka for the treasury from 1898. The 1897 building is still a working shop. The plant makes more than 30 products under brands such as Horobyna, Hubernia and Sumskyi Dvir, and even kvass, and is the only producer of its kind in the region.

Bread, milk, sweets

The Sumy confectionery factory has made marshmallow, jelly sweets, wafers, caramel and halva since 1975. The bread plant makes about a hundred products. The war hits food makers too: on 18 April 2025 Shahed drones struck the Easter-bread shop of a local bakery, killing its owner, and the Sumy dairy halted temporarily in July 2026 because of shelling and power and water cuts.

The city brewery no longer operates; beer for the region is now brewed in the village of Ivolzhanske. The meat plant and the cannery have closed too.

The Horobyna distillery at 121 Petropavlivska Street
The Horobyna distillery at 121 Petropavlivska Street. Its founding date is 12 July 1897, when merchant Prokofii Hrynenko got a patent for a vodka works; State Wine Warehouse No. 7 of 1896 still serves as one of its workshops. It was nationalised in spring 1919.Photo: Оксана Скрипаленко, CC BY-SA 4.0
Cafés on Soborna St, the modern face of eating out in Sumy.
Cafés on Soborna St, the modern face of eating out in Sumy.Photo: Olga Loboda 0806, CC BY-SA 4.0

1981–1986

The Central Market, or 'Daisy'

A covered market was in the master plan as early as 1969. The city's chief architect Mykola Ilchenko turned down the standard Kharkiv design and chose a round domed one, drawn up for Ulyanovsk but never built there. Work began in 1981, stopped in 1983 for lack of money and finished in 1986.

The inner court is more than 56 m across under a cable-stayed roof, and the building's shape earned it the nickname 'Daisy'. In the 1990s the market spread around it over about 5 hectares. On 15 August 2025 a Russian drone hit the market.

The central market, known locally as "the Daisy"
The central market, known locally as "the Daisy". It was built in 1981–1986 to an adapted design of a round domed market from Ulyanovsk chosen by chief city architect Mykola Ilchenko. Its yard, over 56 metres across, is covered by a cable-stayed roof, and it stands on the old Bazaar Square, known since the 18th century.Photo: Кирилл Фомин, CC BY-SA 3.0

What to try

Dishes of the Sumy region

There is no single 'Sumy' dish, but food tourism researchers link several recipes directly to villages in the region:

  • Mutyn dumplings filled with millet porridge and poppy seed, served with boiled potatoes;
  • Krolevets borscht with apples, Horiuny pies, oven potatoes Nedryhailiv style and Christmas flatbreads;
  • 'Cossack babka', a potato mash from Pustovoitivka;
  • tub-fermented sauerkraut, barrel-soaked apples and chicory-root 'coffee'.

These dishes were served at the Christmas food festival Slobozhanski Smaky in Sumy.

Festivals

Fairs and festivals

City Day falls on the first Saturday of September (5 September in 2026). The official founding year is 1655, though some historians give 1652.

Fairs. In the 19th century Sumy held three or four big fairs a year and was part of the travelling wholesale Vozdvyzhensky fair circuit. Nearby Romny hosted one of Ukraine's largest fairs until 1852.

Krolevets towels. The woven towels of Krolevets in Sumy region have been on Ukraine's national list of intangible cultural heritage since 2018.

The hemp festival in the Sadivska community near Sumy held its eighth edition in August 2025, with hemp halva, biscuits, oil and fruit leather.

Sources