Ingul

The Inhul, 354 kilometres long, rises in the Dnieper Upland and runs south between rocky banks of granite and gneiss into the Black Sea lowland, where it joins the Southern Bug. For centuries its upper valley was open steppe, exposed to Tatar raids. Under the New Sich of 1734–1775 the lands along the river formed the Inhul palanka, one of the districts of the Zaporozhian Host.

In 1752 the Russian government settled Serbian colonists on these Cossack lands as New Serbia, and to shield them a six-pointed earthen fortress, St Elizabeth, was raised on the upper Inhul in 1754. Cossacks of the Hadiach and Myrhorod regiments built its main works in four months; of the Zaporozhians sent to the work, 72 died and 855 ran away.