Khortytsia is a study in contrasts drawn by the river itself. Its northern end rises high and rocky, granite cliffs standing where the terrain was once all rapids and stone; its southern end lies low, flooding when the Dnieper runs high. Between them the island carries a surprising mix of worlds: oak groves and spruce woods, open meadow and dry steppe, a compressed cross-section of the region's wild country. The name may honor Khors, an ancient Slavic god of the sun. What is certain is the depth of time here. Nearby islets hold traces of Proto-Indo-European and Scythian occupation, and one of them, excavated in 1927 during the dam's construction, gave its name to the Sredny Stog culture. To stand on Khortytsia is to stand on five millennia of continuous human presence.

For all its deep past, Khortytsia is bound most tightly to the Zaporozhian Cossacks, whose very name means "beyond the rapids." The first recorded sich, the fortified Cossack stronghold, stood on Small Khortytsia, built around 1552 by the Volhynian prince Dmytro Vyshnevetsky; it lasted only six years. Other siches rose and fell downstream over the next two centuries, always at river crossings, and it was at one of them that Bohdan Khmelnytsky launched his great 1648 uprising. Legend places the writing of the Cossacks' famously defiant reply to the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV here, on Khortytsia. This was a warrior democracy of the steppe, self-governing and fierce, and the island remains its symbolic heart, the place where the Cossack story begins.

In 1775 Catherine II ordered the Zaporozhian Sich destroyed, and the Cossacks were scattered. Many resettled far away on the Kuban River in the Caucasus, becoming the Kuban Cossacks; others fled beyond the Danube to live as the Ottoman Sultan's vassals, and some later founded a new sich on the shore of the Sea of Azov. The last elected leader of the Sich, Koshevoy Ataman Petro Kalnyshevsky, met the harshest fate. Imprisoned at the remote Solovetsky Monastery at the age of eighty-five, he endured twenty-five years in captivity, was finally released nearly blind, and died at the monastery at one hundred and thirteen. Fourteen years after the Sich fell, in 1789, Mennonite settlers invited from Danzig took up farming on the island's rich soil and traded in timber from its groves, until they sold Khortytsia to the Alexandrovsk city council in 1916.

Khortytsia was proclaimed a historical and cultural reserve in 1965, folded into the larger Dnieper Rapids reserve in 1974, and granted national status in 1993. Its heart today is the Zaporizhian Cossack museum and historic park, a low modern building set into the landscape with sweeping views of the great dam to the north, opened in 1983. Inside, the exhibits run from the Stone Age through the Scythians down to the twentieth century, and dioramas recreate the island's dramatic moments, from Sviatoslav's last stand at the rapids to a Cossack uprising to the building of the dam. The Cossack horse show still thunders across the grounds. And on Upper Khortytsia stands the Zaporizhzhian Oak, an ancient tree that has outlasted empires, keeping its own long watch over the river.