Nikopol - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

For Nikopol in Bulgaria see Nikopol, Bulgaria
Nikopol, Bulgaria
Nikopol is a town in northern Bulgaria, the administrative center of Nikopol municipality, part of Pleven Province, on the right bank of the Danube river, 4 km downstream from the mouth of the Osam river. It spreads at the foot of steep chalk cliffs along the Danube and up a narrow valley...

.

Nikopol is a city in Ukraine

Ukraine

Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

, in the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast

Dnipropetrovsk Oblast

Dnipropetrovsk Oblast is an oblast of central Ukraine, the most important industrial region of the country. Its administrative center is Dnipropetrovsk....

, on the right bank of Dnieper river, about 100 km south-west of Dnipropetrovsk

Dnipropetrovsk

Dnipropetrovsk or Dnepropetrovsk formerly Yekaterinoslav is Ukraine's third largest city with one million inhabitants. It is located southeast of Ukraine's capital Kiev on the Dnieper River, in the south-central region of the country...

. It has about 128,900 inhabitants (2006 estimate http://www.world-gazetteer.com/wg.php?x=&men=gcis&lng=en&dat=32&geo=-220&srt=npan&col=aohdq&geo=-3719) and is the third biggest city in the oblast as well as among the top 50 nationwide. The city is also a powerful industrial and transportation center in the country conveniently located by the Kakhovka reservoir

Kakhovka Reservoir

The Kakhovka Reservoir is a water reservoir located on the Dnieper River. It covers a total surface area of 2,155 square kilometres in the territories of the Kherson, Zaporizhia, and the Dnipropetrovsk Oblasts of Ukraine...

Encyclopædia Britannica description

The 1911 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica

Encyclopædia Britannica

The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...

gave the following description of Nikopol:
It was formerly called "Mykytyn Rog", and occupies an elongated peninsula between two arms of the Dnieper at a point where its banks are low and marshy, and has been for centuries one of the places where the middle Dnieper can most conveniently be crossed.

In 1900, its 21,282 inhabitants were Ukrainians

Ukrainians

Ukrainians are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Ukraine, which is the sixth-largest nation in Europe. The Constitution of Ukraine applies the term 'Ukrainians' to all its citizens...

, Jews

Jews

The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...

and Mennonites, who carry on agriculture and shipbuilding. The old Sich

Sich

A sich is the administrative and military centre for Cossacks and especially the Zaporizhian Cossacks. It is derived from the Ukrainian word siktý, "to chop", meaning to clear a forest for an encampment, or to build a fortification with the trees that have been chopped down.The Zaporizhian Sich...

, or fortified camp of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, brilliantly described in N. V. Gogol

Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist and novelist.Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism...

's novel Taras Bulba

Taras Bulba

Taras Bulba is a romanticized historical novel by Nikolai Gogol. It tells the story of an old Zaporozhian Cossack, Taras Bulba, and his two sons, Andriy and Ostap. Taras’ sons studied at the Kiev Academy and return home...

(1834), was situated a little higher up the river. Numbers of graves in the vicinity recall the battles which were fought for the possession of this important strategic point. One of them, close to the town, contained, along with other Scythia

Scythia

In antiquity, Scythian or Scyths were terms used by the Greeks to refer to certain Iranian groups of horse-riding nomadic pastoralists who dwelt on the Pontic-Caspian steppe...

n antiquities, the well-known precious vase representing the capture of wild horses. Even now Nikopol, which is situated on the highway from Dnipropetrovsk to Kherson

Kherson

Kherson is a city in southern Ukraine. It is the administrative center of the Kherson Oblast , and is designated as its own separate raion within the oblast. Kherson is an important port on the Black Sea and Dnieper River, and the home of a major ship-building industry...

, is the point where the "salt-highway" of the Chumaks (Ukrainian salt-carriers) to the Crimea

Crimea

Crimea , or the Autonomous Republic of Crimea , is a sub-national unit, an autonomous republic, of Ukraine. It is located on the northern coast of the Black Sea, occupying a peninsula of the same name...

crosses the Dnieper. Nikopol is, further, one of the chief places on the lower Dnieper for the export of corn, linseed, hemp and wool.

History

There are some of the claims by the Russian and Polish historians referring to the area of the medieval and late-medieval times as the Wild Fields

Wild Fields

The Wild Field or the Wilderness is a historical term used in the Polish–Lithuanian documents of the 16th and 18th centuries referring to forest steppes and steppes of the Black sea and Azov sea regions...

. That, of course, is a dubious identification as the land here is famous for its fruitfulness, cultivation of which takes roots into the gray past. The land for a long time was inhibited by inferior people to both the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was a dualistic state of Poland and Lithuania ruled by a common monarch. It was the largest and one of the most populous countries of 16th- and 17th‑century Europe with some and a multi-ethnic population of 11 million at its peak in the early 17th century...

and Moscovy which wanted to colonize it.

In times of the Kievan Rus the land belonged to Pechenegs, who later were displaced by the Polovtsi forces (also known as Cumans

Cumans

The Cumans were Turkic nomadic people comprising the western branch of the Cuman-Kipchak confederation. After Mongol invasion , they decided to seek asylum in Hungary, and subsequently to Bulgaria...

) that establish their own state in the today's southern Ukraine and in the Crimea

Crimea

. In the 13th century the advancing Mongol hordes had conquered the Polovtsi, only running into difficulties in the Crimea, and establishing the Golden Horde

Golden Horde

The Golden Horde was a Mongol and later Turkicized khanate that formed the north-western sector of the Mongol Empire...

. After the fall of the Golden Horde, it is believed that the land belonged to the Nogai people (later under the suzerainty of the Crimean Khanate

Crimean Khanate

Crimean Khanate, or Khanate of Crimea , was a state ruled by Crimean Tatars from 1441 to 1783. Its native name was . Its khans were the patrilineal descendants of Toqa Temür, the thirteenth son of Jochi and grandson of Genghis Khan...

) although it is possible that the land might have been inhabited by a Slavic population as well. Whatever the case, the first concrete historical evidence found for a slavic population is from the 15th century, when the area was being populated by Cossacks. This was first documented in the diary of the Austrian Emperor E.Liasota.

By 1648 in a close proximity to today's Nikopol was built the Mykytyn Sich renowned for the fact that it was here where Bohdan Khmelnytsky

Bohdan Khmelnytsky

Bohdan Zynoviy Mykhailovych Khmelnytsky was a hetman of the Zaporozhian Cossack Hetmanate of Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth . He led an uprising against the Commonwealth and its magnates which resulted in the creation of a Cossack state...

was elected as the Hetman of Ukraine and it was here where the war against the Catholic Polish state has started. Until 1775, the times of the Sich sacking, it was called as "Mykytyn Rih", "Mykytyn Pereviz", or simply "Mykytyne". The name rih (Ukrainian for horn) was given because the locality was based at the place reminiscing a peninsula as it was surrounded by the Dnieper river

Dnieper River

The Dnieper River is one of the major rivers of Europe that flows from Russia, through Belarus and Ukraine, to the Black Sea.The total length is and has a drainage basin of .The river is noted for its dams and hydroelectric stations...

(see Kryvyi Rih

Kryvyi Rih

Kryvyi Rih or Krivoy Rog is a city in central Ukraine. It is situated in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, to the southwest of the oblast's administrative center, Dnipropetrovsk, at the confluence of the Inhulets and Saksahan rivers...

). Mykytyne was a town of the Kodak Palanka, an administrative division of the Zaporizhian Sich

Zaporizhian Sich

Zaporizhian Sich was socio-political, grassroot, military organization of Ukrainian cossacks placed beyond Dnieper rapids. Sich existed between the 16th and 18th centuries in the region around the today's Kakhovka Reservoir...

. Later was renamed into Slovianske and then Nikopol, meaning the city of Nika

Nika

Nika may refer to:* Nika, in Greek, means victory or conquest* Nika, in Persian, means good and happy and beautiful and delicate. The name is also is considered to mean clear and good water...

or Victoria (1781) due to the conquest of the Zaporizhia.

Interestingly that what could be the most sacred place of the early distinctly Ukrainian statehood later was drowned in course of the Soviet policy of industrialization. It is under the Kakhovka Reservoir

Kakhovka Reservoir

where lay the lands of the former Zaporizhian Host and the burials of thousands of former heroes whose names, probably, would never be recovered.

Just several miles west outside of the city was buried the Kosh otaman Ivan Sirko

Ivan Sirko

Ivan Sirko was a Cossack military leader, Koshovyi Otaman of the Zaporozhian Host and putative co-author of the famous semi-legendary Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks that inspired a major painting by the 19th-century artist Ilya Repin.- Biography :...

External links

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