This is the final installment in this series. Most of these photos can be selected for a better view. The ones that are grouped in twos or threes, especially, can be selected for a much more detailed view. I took great care in selecting and improving these photos from our trip this area in the Fall of 2020, I hope you enjoy them.
ZAPORIZHIA
Zaporizhia on the wide Dnieper River has a long and illustrious history. Scythians lived all around here perhaps as far back as 1000 BC. Also Turkic Khazars, Kumans, Tatars, Cossacks, and Slavs made this area their home.
Being a navigable river, it was well-known to Greek traders. The Greek geographer Herodotus wrote about the Dnieper:
“As far inland as the place named Gerrhos, which is distant forty days’ voyage from the sea, its course is known, and its direction is from north to south; but above this, no one has traced it, so as to say through what countries it flows. It enters the territory of the Scythian Husbandmen after running for some time through a desert region… It is the only river besides the Nile the sources of which are unknown…” The Histories, Book IV.53
The first written record of Zaporizhia was in 1492, the same year that Columbus sailed the ocean blue!
The whole area on both sides of the Dnieper was known as the “Wild Fields“, the largely untamed region that the surrounding powers (Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Grand Duchy of Moscow, and the Ottoman Empire) were either unable or unwilling to claim. But finally in 1789 Catherine the Great of Russia invited Mennonites to settle in this area. They came over en masse from Prussian Danzig. The island of Khortitza, erstwhile stronghold of the Cossacks, was given over to these Mennonites for a “perpetual possession”.
But perpetuity was not to be had. In 1914 the Mennonites sold the island to the city and the majority eventually left. The Russian Revolution and World War 2, especially, meant hard times for them. Many of those who did not see the writing on the wall and emigrate to the New World were forced to relocate to central Russia and Siberia.
With the building of the Zaporizhia dam in 1932 the danger of rapids were mostly a thing of the past. So were many villages. The water level rising 40 meters, dozens of villages on both side were flooded. But with the dam the cities of Zaporizhia, Dnipro, and Kiev now had port access to the Black Sea.
But the Soviets added another chapter to this dam story. In 1941, in WW2, they blew a large breach in the dam, flooding the area all the way down to Nikopol. This killed thousands of civilians, as well as soldiers on both sides. The death toll was between 20,000 and 100,000. Later in the war the Germans used forced labor to repair the dam.
“What are you doing here?”
This was the question put to us by a young couple whose apartment we rented in Kryvyi Rih, a city as hard to pronounce as it is to spell.. Part of it was just a finger-on-the-map whim. Also it was on the way back to Kiev, where we were due soon to fly out. It seemed like a normal Ukrainian mid-sized city, not touristy at all. And that is usually a plus for us.
But for them it was odd, the equivalent of a foreigner from, say, China wanting to see Cleveland or Wheeling, West Virginia.
Kropyvnytskyi
This could be a photo from a hundred years ago – if you do not look too carefully.
I hope you enjoyed reading these articles. Feel free to write. Comments, corrections, praise, censure – all equally welcome. Below are links to all of my Ukraine articles:
Ukraine Between Wars: Ivano-Frankivsk, Odesa, Kiev, Ternopil, Uman
https://fromnowhere2nowhere.wordpress.com/2022/04/29/ukraine-between-wars/
Ukraine Between Wars 2: Chernihiv, Nizhyn, Myrhorod
https://fromnowhere2nowhere.wordpress.com/2022/05/17/ukraine-between-the-wars-2-chernihiv-nizhyn-myrorhod/
Ukraine Between Wars 3: Poltava, Kharkiv, Izyum
https://fromnowhere2nowhere.wordpress.com/2022/06/05/ukraine-between-the-wars-3-poltava-kharkiv-izyumwe-stayed-only-a-couple-of-days-in-poltava-not-being-able-to-find-a-suitable-place-to-stay-long-consequently-i-did-not-get-to-see-the-city-like-i/
Ukraine Between Wars 4: Kramatorsk, Mariupol, Berdyansk
https://fromnowhere2nowhere.wordpress.com/2022/06/09/ukraine-between-the-wars-4-kramatorsk-mariupol-berdyansk/
Ukraine Between Wars 5: Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Kryvyi Rih, Kropyvnytskyi
https://fromnowhere2nowhere.wordpress.com/2022/06/14/ukraine-between-the-wars-5-zaporizhia-dnipropetrovsk-kryvyi-rih-kropyvnytskyi/
DONETSK DETOUR: September 2020
https://fromnowhere2nowhere.wordpress.com/2021/09/15/donetsk-detour-september-2020/
Berdyansk, “The Odessa of Azov”
https://fromnowhere2nowhere.wordpress.com/2021/10/20/berdyansk-the-odessa-of-azov/
YAREMCHE: UKRAINE’S WILD WEST
https://fromnowhere2nowhere.wordpress.com/2021/08/01/yaremche-ukraines-wild-west/