Cherkasy

Cherkasy stands on the right bank of the Dnieper, where the settled lands met the open steppe. A fortified town on the southern frontier of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, it became an important early centre of the Ukrainian Cossacks. Its people took part in campaigns against Tatars and Ottomans, while the castle guarded the riverbank.

In the sixteenth century the starosta Ostafiy Dashkevych was among the figures associated with the frontier community. A new castle was built in 1549–52, and after the Union of Lublin in 1569 Cherkasy passed to the Polish Crown. The Cherkasy Cossack regiment, formed in 1625, played a prominent part in Bohdan Khmelnytsky's uprising and became an administrative unit of the Hetmanate. Cherkasy remained on the Polish side after the truce of Andrusovo in 1667. The town was damaged during the Koliivshchyna rising in 1768. It received Magdeburg rights in 1791, shortly before the second partition of Poland placed it under Russian rule in 1793.