Today we’d like to recommend a short but interesting book: *Signs of Ukrainian Colonization in the Urals*, published by V. Korolenko in 1906 in Kyiv.

It is fascinating for many reasons—including the history of the settlement of the southern Urals by the Zaporozhian and Don Cossacks, their long-standing rivalry (the so-called Yaik and Ilets Cossacks), competition over natural resources, and differences in dialect. The author points out the tolerance of the Ukrainian (Ilets) Cossacks toward settlers of other nationalities (especially the Tatars), and also draws attention to the fact that the founders of the Iletsk settlements in 1737 were certain individuals named Andrei Denisov Cherkasov and Ivan Nikiforov Izyumsky. At the same time, the author emphasizes that

Izyumsky and Cherkasov, whom the documents refer to as “people of Cherkasy origin,” are now identified by the places they came from, rather than by their former surnames.

In other words, the founders of the Ilek settlements may well have been Cossacks from Sloboda Ukraine and Izyum. The village of Ilek still exists today; it is located in the Orenburg Region, 3 km from the border with Kazakhstan, and has a population of 10,000. Alluring Kharkiv will continue to search for traces of Sloboda Ukraine all over the world…

You can download the book in .pdf format here: