Qualla: Hlukhiv

Hlukhiv: Introduction

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dmytro Petishkin, CC BY 4.0. In November 1708, in the Trinity Cathedral of a town called Hlukhiv, a metropolitan was compelled to pronounce a curse. The anathema fell on Ivan Mazepa, the Cossack hetman who had thrown in his lot with Sweden's Charles XII, and it fell in Hlukhiv because the old capital of Baturyn had just been destroyed on orders from Peter the Great. Overnight, this modest town on the Esman River became the seat of the Cossack Hetmanate. For the next half-century the fate of Cossack Ukraine was decided in Hlukhiv, and the town remade itself in Baroque splendor to suit its new role, a small place suddenly made to carry the weight of a nation's capital.

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Image: Dmytro Petishkin | CC BY 4.0

Hlukhiv: Eight Centuries of Changing Hands

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dmytro Petishkin, CC BY 4.0. Hlukhiv is old enough to have belonged to nearly everyone. Chroniclers first noted it in 1152 as a town of the Severian lands, and after the Mongol invasion it became the seat of a branch of the Chernihiv princes. From the fourteenth century it passed to the Grand Duchy of Lithua...

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Image: Dmytro Petishkin | CC BY 4.0

Hlukhiv: The Capital That Sang

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dmytro Petishkin, CC BY 4.0. As the capital of the Hetmanate from 1708 to 1764, and afterward the administrative center of the Little Russia Governorate, Hlukhiv was rebuilt in the elegant Baroque style favored by the last hetmans. Fires would later consume much of that finery, but the town's cultural inheri...

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Image: Dmytro Petishkin | CC BY 4.0

Hlukhiv: The Oldest Arch in Ukraine

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. DDima assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY 2.5. Walk the town today and its history stands in stone. The oldest building is the Church of St. Nicholas, raised in 1693 in the Ukrainian Baroque style with three pear-shaped domes, modeled on the traditional wooden churches of the region. Grander later monuments include the Transf...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. DDima assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY 2.5

Hlukhiv: Sugar, Charity, and a French Grandson

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Олекса-Київ, CC BY-SA 3.0. Hlukhiv's later prosperity owed much to the Tereshchenko family, Ukrainian-born magnates who made fortunes in sugar and gave lavishly back. In 1879 the Tereshchenko brothers endowed a free hospital in the town and supported it out of their own pockets, and in 1899 their money fou...

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Image: Олекса-Київ | CC BY-SA 3.0