  This talk consists of two very different parts: the first one deals with
non-perturbative QCD and physics of the chiral restoration, the second with
rather low-key (and still unfinished) work aiming at obtaining EOS and other
properties of hot/dense hadronic matter from data on heavy ion collisions. The
microscopic mechanism for chiral restoration phase transition is a transition
from randomly placed tunneling events (instantons) at low T to a set of
strongly correlated tunneling-anti-tunneling events (known as instanton -
anti-instanton molecules) at high T. Many features of the transition can be
explained in this simple picture, especially the critical line and its
dependence on quark masses. This scenario predicts qualitative change of the
basic quark-quark interactions around the phase transition line, with some
states (such as pion-sigma ones) probably surviving even at $T>T_c$. In the
second half of the talk we discuss experimental data on collective flow in
heavy ion collision, its hydro-based description and relation to equation of
state (EOS). A distinct feature of the QCD phase transition region is high
degree of ``softness'', (small ratio pressure/energy density).
  We present some preliminary results indicated that it is indeed needed to
explain the radial flow at SPS energies.
