Introduction

Nicholas Zharkikh

Shortened text of the section.
Full text in ukrainian version.

The subject of the work is source information about Pobozhye, starting from the earliest. The main attention will be paid to geographical objects in this territory and their names, and even more narrowly – to objects on the southern border of settled Ukrainian colonization.

Based on the accumulated source information, I will try to draw conclusions regarding some controversial issues of the historical geography of the region, in particular, regarding "Vytautas" toponyms.

For centuries, the region was divided between the zones of influence of two, and sometimes even three super-ethnos – Orthodox, Catholic, and steppe (Islamic), which led to a variety of sources and (possible) contacts of different cultures.

In searching for the origins of the history of Pobozhye and the Ochakiv Steppe, I will not delve into ancient times with their Tiras, Borysthenes, Hypanis, and Exampai. The ancient Greek geographical nomenclature left no trace in the living memory of the peoples who lived in this territory in the Middle Ages and in modern times.

All names like Olviopol, Tiraspol, Kherson, Roksolany are the result of the study of ancient geography by educated people of the late 18th century and later, that is, they are modern toponyms of book origin.

You should know that Pobozhye in Ukrainian means "the lands along the river Bog." This river is often called the Southern Bug, and the word Bog means God.

I will call the upper Pobozhye the flow from the source of the Bog to Khmilnyk (the mouth of the Snivoda river); the middle Pobozhye – the territory along the Bog from the mouth of the Snivoda to the mouth of the Savranka river; the lower Pobozhye – the territory from the mouth of the Savranka to the Dnieper-Bog estuary. The Ochakiv steppe in this work denotes the steppe territory from the lower Dniester to the lower Bog. Another technical note: just at the time of writing this work, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted a new district division. But all references to districts in the work refer to the district division that was in effect in 1962 – 2020, only in parentheses will I indicate the district according to the modern division if its name is different, for example: Bershad (Haisyn) district.

Ilya Andreyev, Bohdan Berezenko, Dmytro Vortman, Pylyp Gavrylenko, Oleksandr Galenko, Tetyana Gedz, Tetyana Kuzyk, Vitaliy Mykhaylovsky, Vasyl Starko, Viktor Talakh, Maria Shvedova, and Mykhailo Yakubovych provided me with great help while writing this work. I express my sincere gratitude to all of them.