Bila Tserkva

Bila Tserkva stands on the Ros, in the old defensive belt south of Kyiv. Founded as Yuriiv under Yaroslav the Wise, it guarded the lands of Rus' against steppe raiders. Its later name means White Church, perhaps recalling the pale walls of the medieval cathedral that once stood here.

In 1550 the Kyiv voivode Fryderyk Proński built a castle on this exposed frontier. The town grew around it, and by 1616 many of its households were Cossack. King Sigismund III granted Magdeburg rights in 1620. Bohdan Khmelnytsky's forces captured the castle in 1648; three years later the town gave its name to a treaty between the Cossacks and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It became the centre of a Cossack regiment, and in 1702 Semen Palii seized the castle during his uprising against Polish rule. In 1774 the estate passed to Hetman Franciszek Ksawery Branicki. His family built a residence and laid out the landscape park of Oleksandriia. The town entered the Russian Empire in the second partition of Poland in 1793.