Ternopil - History

History

The city was founded in 1540 by Jan Amor Tarnowski as a military stronghold and a castle. In 1544 the Ternopil Castle was constructed and repelled its first Tatar attacks. In 1548 Ternopil was granted city rights by king Sigismund I the Old. In 1567 the city passed to the Ostrogski family. In 1575 it was plundered by the Tatars. In 1623 the city passed to the Zamoyski family.

In the 17th century the town was almost wiped from the face of the Earth in the Khmelnytsky Uprising which drove out or killed most of its Jewish residents. Ternopil was almost completely destroyed by the Turks and Tatars in 1675 and rebuilt by Aleksander Koniecpolski but did not recover its previous glory until it passed to Marie Casimire, the wife of king Jan III Sobieski in 1690. The city was later sacked for the last time by Tatars in 1694, and twice by Russians in the course of the Great Northern War in 1710 and the War of the Polish Succession in 1733. In 1747 Józef Potocki invited the Dominicanes and founded the beautiful late-baroque Dominican Church (today the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of The Blessed Virgin Mary of the Ternopil-Zboriv eparchy of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church). The city was thrice looted during the confederation of Bar (1768–1772), by the confederates themselves, by the king's army and by Russians. In 1770 it was further devastated by an outbreak of smallpox.

In 1772 the city came under Austrian rule. In 1809 the city came under Russian rule, which created Ternopol krai there. In 1815 the city (then with 11,000 residents) returned to the Austrian rule in accordance with the Congress of Vienna. In 1820 Jesuits expelled from Polatsk by the Russians established a gymnasium in Ternopil. In 1870 a rail line connected Ternopil with Lviv, accelerating the city's growth. At that time Ternopil had a population of about 25,000.

During World War I the city passed from German and Austrian forces to Russia several times. In 1917 it was burnt down by fleeing Russian forces. After the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the city was proclaimed part of the West Ukrainian People's Republic on 11 November 1918. After Polish forces captured Lviv during the Polish-Ukrainian War, Ternopil became the country's temporary capital (22 November to 30 December 1918). After the act of union between Western-Ukrainian Republic and the Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR), Ternopil formally passed under the UPR's control. On 15 July 1919 the city was captured by Polish forces. In 1920 the exiled Ukrainian government of Symon Petlura accepted Polish control of Ternopil and of the entire area in exchange for Polish assistance in restoration of Petlura's government in Kyiv. This effort ultimately failed, and in July and August 1920 the Red Army captured Ternopil in the course of the Polish-Soviet War. The city then served as the capital of the Galician Soviet Socialist Republic. By the terms of the Riga treaty, the Soviets and Poles partitioned Ukraine. For the next 19 years, Ternopil area fell under Polish control.

From 1922 to September 1939, Ternopil served as the capital of the Tarnopol Voivodeship that consisted of 17 powiats. The policies of the Polish authorities, especially the assimilationist ethnic policies, affected all spheres of public life. Ukrainians, who according to the official 1939 Statistical Yearbook of Poland, supposedly made up less than half of voivodship's population, were restricted in their rights and prosecuted for any attempts to oppose the Polonization. This created a strong backlash and strengthened the position of the militant Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists whose local Ternopil branch was led by Roman Paladiychuk and Taras Stetsko, the future leader of OUN,

As the Polish state collapsed in September 1939, the former partners from the Riga treaty, the Soviets, now allied with the Germans, included Ternopil into their Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Soviets made it their first priority to destroy the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and exterminate its leaders. Mass arrests, torture and executions of Ukrainians and Poles followed. The Soviets also carried out mass deportations of the "enemies of the working class" to Kazakhstan. In practice, this translated into members of the former state administration, police, border service, land and business owners.

In 1941 the city was occupied by the Germans who continued exterminating the population by murdering the Jews and sending Ukrainians as forced labour to Germany. 1941-1943 center of Armia Krajowa District. In April 1944 the city was retaken by the Red Army, the remaining Polish population having been previously expelled. During the Soviet reoccupation in March and April 1944, the city was encircled and completely destroyed. In March 1944 the city was declared a fortified place by Adolf Hitler, to be defended until the last round was shot. The stiff German resistance caused extensive use of heavy artillery by the Red Army, resulting in the complete destruction of the city and killing of nearly all German defenders. (55 survivors out of 4,500) Unlike many other occasions, where the Germans had practised a scorched earth policy during their withdrawal from territories of the Soviet Union, the devastation was caused directly by the hostilities. After World War II Ternopil was rebuilt in typically Soviet style. Only a few buildings were reconstructed.

Since 1991 Ternopil has been a part of independent Ukraine, along with other cities of western Ukraine. Ternopil has became an important center of Ukrainian national revival.