Who "Founded" Ukrainian Cities: A Myth Debunked

The myth of the “gift cities”

Pro-Russian petitions and comment threads keep circulating the same list: Kherson “founded by Catherine in 1778”, Mykolaiv “in 1789”, Odesa “in 1794”, Donetsk “by Alexander II in 1869”; Simferopol, Sevastopol, Mariupol, Kryvyi Rih, Zaporizhzhia — supposedly imperial creations too^[1]. The conclusion the reader is meant to draw: the cities are Russia’s “gift”, and therefore the claims to them are lawful.

The scheme works only as long as nobody opens the very documents it cites. Let us do exactly that.

Cities are not born of decrees

The myth’s main methodological error is the notion that a city comes into being the moment a paper is signed. Cities arise at the crossroads of trade routes, by fords and harbours — and settlements on the sites of the cities “founded by empresses” existed long before the decrees^[4].

The oldest cities of Ukraine need no commentary at all: Kyiv, Chernihiv and Pereyaslav are recorded in the chronicle at the beginning of the tenth century — in Oleh’s treaty with the Greeks of 907, Chernihiv is named among the cities to which Byzantium pays tribute^[2]. That is eight and a half centuries before Catherine II.

Tellingly, the same petitions are forced to explain Kyiv as well: under the “Eternal Peace” of 1686, they say, it was “bought in perpetuity” by Russia from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for 146,000 rubles^[3]. The compensation is a real fact — Muscovy did pay the Commonwealth an additional 146,000 rubles for renouncing its claims to Kyiv. But note the logic: if a city had to be “bought”, it certainly existed before the buyer — and the argument “we founded it” quietly turns into “we purchased it”. For how Ukrainian lands actually passed from hand to hand, see the article on the Lithuanian-Polish era.

Odesa: the edict with no Odesa in it

The flagship of the myth is “Catherine founded Odesa in 1794”. Open Catherine II’s rescript of 27 May 1794: it orders the building of a “military harbour together with a merchant quay” — at Khadzhibei. The word “Odesa” does not appear in the document at all^[5]. The settlement of Khadzhibei (Kachibei) has been known since 1415 — it is mentioned by Jan Długosz, 379 years before the rescript. The name “Odesa” appears in documents only from January 1795 — a tribute to the antique fashion for “Greek” names (more on that below).

In other words, even within the empire’s own optics, the “founding of Odesa” was a decision to develop a port in a long-existing settlement and later rename it.

Donetsk: not Alexander II but the Welshman John Hughes

With Donetsk the petitions fare especially awkwardly: Emperor Alexander II was appointed its “founder”. In reality the city began as Yuzivka — a settlement at the metallurgical works that the Welsh engineer John Hughes started building in 1869^[6]. Hughes bought out a concession from Prince Kochubei for 24,000 pounds, founded the “New Russia Company” for coal, iron and rail production, blew in the first blast furnace in 1871 — and it was his surname that gave the city the name Yuzivka, which it bore until 1924. British capital and Ukrainian coal — such is the genealogy of “Russian” Donetsk.

The south and Crimea: to rename is not to found

The cities of southern Ukraine and Crimea are the list’s favourite part — and its most misleading. Crimean cities existed for centuries before the Russian annexation of 1783: Sevastopol was laid out beside the Crimean Tatar village of Akhtiar (Aq Yar), known from Ottoman registers of the 1680s, and until 1826 the city itself was officially called Akhtiar; Simferopol grew up next to Aq Mechet — the residence of the kalga, the second-highest figure of the Crimean Khanate^[8].

Where, then, did the “Greek” names come from? From a political programme: the “Greek Project” of Catherine II and Potemkin — a plan to restore the Byzantine Empire under a Russian protectorate, with the empress’s grandson Constantine on the throne of Constantinople. Under this ideology the newly annexed and renamed cities of the south received names “in the Greek manner”: Kherson (after ancient Chersonesus), Sevastopol, Simferopol, Mariupol, Yevpatoria, Odesa — after the ancient Odessos^[8]. Renaming is an instrument of appropriation: the Greek signboard was meant to erase the Crimean Tatar, Cossack and multi-ethnic landscape that really existed here — and southern Ukraine was settled and built up by Ukrainians, Greeks, Bulgarians and other communities, not by “the empress in person”^[7].

Even where an imperial document is named as the “founding” date, the story is more complicated. Kryvyi Rih was first officially mentioned in 1775 — but as a postal station set up by order of Petro Kalnyshevsky, kosh otaman of the Zaporozhian Sich: a Cossack, not an imperial, initiative, and the settlement is documented from 1761 onwards. Zaporizhzhia counts its history from the Oleksandrivska fortress of 1770 — a military strongpoint of the Dnipro Line that became a district town only in 1806, while Cossack siches and settlements had existed nearby for centuries.

Lviv: the city built by a prince of Rus

The list of “gift cities” concerns the south and the east — but the same colonial reflex is extended to western Ukraine too, with the question put bluntly: “and whose, exactly, is Lviv?”. The answer is simple and documented: Lviv was built by the Rus prince Danylo Romanovych — the man crowned King of Rus in 1253 (Rus here being the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia, not Muscovy) — and he named the city after his son Lev^[9]. The first written mention of Lviv appears under the year 1256 in the Galician-Volhynian Chronicle (a description of a fire in Kholm whose glow was visible even from Lviv). Around 1272 Lev Danylovych moved the capital of his principality here.

This dismantles the myth from the opposite side: Lviv was founded by a ruler of Rus half a millennium before these lands entered Moscow’s orbit at all (the Austrian and then Soviet eras belong to the 18th—20th centuries). No Russian tsar had anything to do with the founding of Lviv — the city is older than the Muscovite state itself.

What this means

The myth of the “gift cities” is colonial optics in its purest form: the history of the land begins the moment the empire sets foot on it, and everything that came before — the khans, the Cossacks, the Greeks, the Lithuanian and Polish eras — is declared non-existent. A rescript without the word “Odesa”, the Welshman Hughes instead of Alexander II, Akhtiar beneath “Sevastopol” and Kalnyshevsky behind “Catherine’s” Kryvyi Rih — each concrete case exposes the same mechanism: the empire renames and appropriates, then passes it off as creation. For how this mechanism works at the scale of the whole country, see Was Ukraine a Russian Colony and the 1954 transfer of Crimea.