In 2023, Kateryna and Oleksandr Synky moved from Kyiv to the village of Hrechyntsi, Khmelnytskyi region, where they purchased an old house for $2,000. Now the AIT family grows grapes, develops a business, has its own charity fund Kid's Future, and is creating a children's center.
In 2023, Kateryna and Oleksandr Synky moved from Kyiv to the village of Hrechyntsi, Khmelnytskyi region, where they purchased an old house for $2,000. Now the AIT family grows grapes, develops a business, has its own charity fund Kid's Future, and is creating a children's center.
The idea of moving came about by chance after watching a video about restoring an old home, but the family approached the choice of location systematically. The main criteria were picturesque nature and the possibility of installing fiber-optic Internet to continue working in IT, writes the online publication "Zemlyak".
Having chosen the village of Hrechyntsi in the Khmelnytskyi region, the couple deliberately purchased an old house without utilities in order to convert it to their own needs. The move took place in December 2023 with their young son, and later, already in the village, their daughter was born.
Despite a difficult first winter in one room without amenities, the couple turned the home into an autonomous fortress with its own well, modern communications, and solar panels for energy independence.
Combining an IT career, raising children, and rural life requires special endurance and a complete change in approaches to time and budget planning.
Kateryna notes that the village has a specific seasonal time management system: the period from spring to autumn is dedicated to intensive physical labor on the land, and rest is postponed until winter.
The financial component is also seasonal and is accompanied by significant costs for logistics, equipment, and fertilizers. Former AIT workers are sometimes surprised by the cost of rural services — for example, the purchase and delivery of 28 trailers of manure cost the family 14,000 UAH, which they jokingly call an investment in “golden fertilizer.”
The family's business journey in Hrechyntsi began with Oleksandr's experiments with pekmez — an authentic thick syrup made from grape juice, boiled without sugar.
After a successful trial batch, the family founded the LevKo brand, but faced its first difficulties: a large batch of purchased raw materials turned out to be unsuccessful due to bitterness. This experience taught the couple that purchasing grapes is too expensive, so they postponed the development of this direction until their own vineyard matured.
Currently, the main product is pastila, for which the B2B segment was chosen instead of the retail market. Since the path to profitability in farming is long, Oleksandr continues to work in IT, which allows the family to pragmatically test new niches, in particular, growing tomatoes in open ground with the prospect of further investment in greenhouses.
“Retail sales are currently scarce. That’s why we focus on corporate gifts and White Label. And here our IT skills help us: we created an artificial AI agent. It automatically searches for partners based on certain parameters in the “agro” and “farm” categories. We make sure that AI works in the village and looks for sales markets for us,” shares Kateryna.
After the last kindergarten and gymnasium in Hrechyntsi were closed, the Synkiv couple decided to independently create infrastructure for the development of children in small communities. They founded the charity fund "Kid's Future", which in a year of work covered more than 27 kindergartens with systematic educational assistance and purchased a separate house to create a children's center. The fund is committed to sustainable development: the family won a grant to prepare for the creation of an endowment - target capital for long-term financing of education. In addition to strategic educational programs, the organization helps to solve critical domestic needs of communities, for example, by providing premises with heating equipment.
Kateryna and Oleksandr openly share their story on the YouTube channel Synko Family to inspire those who are hesitant about moving out of town. In the video, the family candidly captures real everyday life, mistakes, and victories. The main goal of the channel is to show that life in the village is not a forced step, but a strategic choice based on financial freedom and responsibility for one's own decisions.
