Nikopol, Ukraine

For Nikopol in Bulgaria see Nikopol, Bulgaria.

Nikopol (Нікополь)
City Administration Building.
Flag Coat of arms
Map of Ukraine political Oblast Dnipropetrowsk
Country	Ukraine
Oblast	Dnipropetrovsk Oblast
City Municipality	Nikopol
Founded	1782
Area
– Total	50 km2 (19.3 sq mi)
Population (2010)
– Total	122 873
– Density	2,764/km2 (7,158.7/sq mi)
Postal code	53200—53239
Area code(s)	+380-5662

Nikopol (Ukrainian: Нікополь; Russian: Ни́кополь; Greek: Νικόπολις, literally: "City of Victory") is a city in Ukraine, in the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, on the right bank of Dnieper river, about 100 km south-west of Dnipropetrovsk. It has about 128,900 inhabitants (2006 estimate [1]) 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^{[clarification needed]} conveniently located by the Kakhovka reservoir.

Encyclopædia Britannica description

The 1911 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica 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, Jews and Mennonites, who carry on agriculture and shipbuilding. The old Sich, or fortified camp of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, brilliantly described in N. V. Gogol's novel Taras Bulba (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 Scythian 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, is the point where the "salt-highway" of the Chumaks (Ukrainian salt-carriers) to the Crimea 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. 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 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) that establish their own state in the today's southern Ukraine and in the 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. 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) 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 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 (see Kryvyi Rih). Mykytyne was a town of the Kodak Palanka, an administrative division of the Zaporizhian Sich. Later was renamed into Slovianske and then Nikopol, meaning the city of Nika 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 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.

External links

• Official city website
• Location via Encarta Maps
• Entertainment complex

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

Coordinates: 47°34′N 34°24′E / 47.567°N 34.4°E / 47.567; 34.4