Seeds of History of Ukrainian Cities Quiz

Answer: Odesa

The port of Kochiubiv is mentioned in documents of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which, in the 14th and 15th centuries, included the Ukrainian lands, sub anno 1415. It was a port from which grain was shipped to the Byzantine capital of Constantinople.

The name Odesa was given after 1794, when Russian Tsarina Catherine II mistakenly identified the site with the ancient Greek city of Odessos. In classical antiquity, an Ancient Greek commerce hub called Tyras was located in the vicinity, thus explaining the confusion (another part of the story is Catherine's desire to rule with the lofty trappings of Enlightened Monarchy, a concept very popular at the time).

Answer: Kherson

The name Bilikhovitsi is mentioned in at least two maps produced before 1700. Its morphology and pronunciation testify to the Ukrainian linguistic affinities of the population. The name Kherson is the result of the policies of Catherine II, who mistakenly identified the city with the site where Kyivan prince Volodymyr the Great had been baptised as a Christian.

The actual place of the prince's baptism was either in Kyiv or in the Ancient and Medieval Greek city of Khersonesos Taurike, near modern-day Sevastopol in Crimea.

The renaming should be understood in the context of the Imperial Russian wish to co-opt for themselves the history of the medieval Kyivan state.

Answer: Kharkiv

The name Kharkiv literally means "of Kharko." Kharko is a diminutive name and can be used for individuals bearing either of the two names.

The traditional founding date of Kharkiv is 1654. In that year, a voevoda (military commander) of Muscovy (the state which became the Russian Empire in 1721, after appropriating the medieval politonym of Rus'), stationed in Belgorod, complained of the refusal of the nearby Cherkasy and their fortresses and towns (Cherkasy was a term that Muscovite sources in the 16th and 17th centuries used for Ukrainian Cossacks) to obey the Muscovite sovereign. This we know due to the extensive research of Kharkiv-based historian Dmytro Bahalyi, whose object of research was the settlement of northeastern Ukraine (Slobidska Ukraina, id est "Ukraine of the tax-free settlements").

Answer: Dnipro

The city of Dnipro occupies a strategic location on the river of the same name, hence why the first Cossack posts in its vicinity are recorded from 1524, when the first mention of the village of Taromske is recorded. According to the historian Dmytro Yavornytskyi, the Cossacks viewed Taromske as their older settlement in the vicinity. Novyi Kodak is attested more than a century later, first mentioned in a document of 1656 as an administrative center used by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Polovytsia derives its name from the Polovtsy, or Cumans, steppe warriors who dwelled in southeastern Ukraine during the Middle Ages, and was also a Cossack settlement. Those villages merged into a single city at the end of the 18th century.

Answer: Donetsk

The businessman is John Hughes, who established a factory in modern-day Donetsk, with the arising city being named Yuzivka in his honor. However, the land was not empty, as sixteen Ukrainian Cossack hamlets, villages, and tax-free settlements (slobody) were located on the site, having been established in the 17th and 18th centuries, when the area was part of the Kalmius Palanka, a military-civilian administrative structure of the Ukrainian Cossacks.

Some of them, like Oleksandrivska Sloboda or the village of Krutyi Yar (alternatively, Krutoyarivka), became names for districts of the city during the pre-Soviet era.

Answer: Donetsk

Ruchenkove Pole is located in the southwestern part of Donetsk. The first victims of political repressions were executed there in 1937 and numbered no less than 1,000 people, notwithstanding the separate executions of ethnic Germans and Greeks. More executions occurred in 1941, when "enemies of the people" and even children of "enemies of the people" were executed by the NKVD in haste as the armies of Nazi Germany were approaching the city.

This wave of executions claimed more than 4,000 lives. After the end of the Second World War, the area was kept under close supervision, and hundreds, if not thousands, of people were executed there.

Answer: Dnipro

This happened in November of that year and occurred within the Ukrainian War of Independence.

Nestor Makhno was a charismatic leader who combined elements of anarchism with Ukrainian nationalism/patriotism and fought for the independence of Ukraine against both the Red and White Armies. He first occupied the city of Dnipro in late 1918, but was forced to abandon it because of a Red Army onslaught. Later, he reclaimed the city but held it only for November 1919, when he made it his capital. The White Army drove him out, however, and finally the Red Army occupied Dnipro again in January 1920.

Answer: Kharkiv

The reason for this status of Kharkiv was its proximity to Russia, from where the Bolsheviks launched their offensive into Ukraine. Before 1917 was over, a Soviet Congress was held in Kharkiv, but the local population was not supportive of Soviet rule, as evidenced by British historian Robert Conquest's book "Harvest of Sorrow". On April 19, 1918, Ukrainian troops led by Colonel Petro Bolbochan liberated Kharkiv.

This allowed for the opening of schools and newspapers in the Ukrainian language. However, this span of freedom was short-lived, as the city found itself under Soviet rule in January 1919.

Answer: Kherson

The erection of the monument to Howard, which occurred in 1820, was not the result of a whim, but a tribute to the man who, at his own expense, arranged for medical services to be provided to countless sick people in Kherson, with the vast majority of them suffering from typhus. Howard, unfortunately, perished in Kherson, succumbing to the very disease he did so much to combat.

In 2023 and 2024, a street and a square in Kherson, which had previously borne names associated with Russia, were renamed in honor of Howard.

Answer: Odesa

The landing happened because of the trepidation of the Entente (the winners of the First World War) at the prospect of a Bolshevik victory over the White Army. The Entente was also not very friendly to the oppressed peoples of the disintegrating Romanov Empire, who were trying to reclaim their independent statehood. Ergo, there was only limited and sporadic cooperation between Entente forces and Ukrainian troops.

Throughout the Ukrainian War of Independence, only twice was Odesa under Ukrainian administration: first, from November 1917 to the end of January 1918, and afterwards from the spring to the fall of 1918.