Nikolev, Ukraine Phone Directory

Ukraine is a country situated in the oriental part of the Europe and which has a border to Russia. The name of the country comes from the ancient Slavonic language, and means “border territory”. They gave it this name because it has always been at the border of the Russian empire, and was named during the middle ages “small Russia”.

The oldest proofs of people inhabiting these territories are from about four thousand years B.C. later this territory was a Greek, a roman and a Byzantine colony, especially the area on the shore of the Black sea. During the 7^th century, the east of the Ukraine used to be part of Bulgaria. This added a lot of foreign names to the Ukraine phone directory, none of which are related to the geographical area where Ukraine lays today.

During the 9^th century, most of the Ukrainian territory was inhabited by Russians that formed a state named Russian Kiev and which became the strongest in Europe at that time. The following centuries this was the cradle of the Ukrainian national identity and for other Slavonic nations and Kiev, the capital of today’s Ukraine became the most important city of that time in Russia.

The golden ages of the Russian Kiev started at the beginning of the 19^th century and this is when the Christian religion started to gain strength in this area. At this time Russian Kiev was at the peak of its cultural and military development. But this period only lasted about three hundred years, because the state started to break into pieces and the importance of other strong states from the same area rose again.

Russian Kiev ended by dividing into separate states and was completely destroyed after the Mongolian invasion from the 13^th century. At the half of the 14^th century, the centre of the former Russian Kiev, including the city of Kiev itself was included in Lithuania, and then in Poland, as a result of the union of these two countries. Under the cultural and politic pressure of the Polish, many Ukrainian nobles turned to Catholicism, so the common people searched the protection pf Cossacks, which remained faithful to the Orthodox religion and tended to react violently against their enemies, especially against the Polish rulers.

At the half of the 17^th century the Cossacks and the Ukrainian peasants formed a military state that was not controlled by the Polish, but the Cossacks proved to be useful in the struggle against the Turks, so, from time to time, the two states occasionally fought together against a potential Turkish occupation. As you can see Ukraine had a much weltered history, and the Ukrainians fought a lot to defend their integrity of their nation. The mix of different names from the Ukraine phone directory is a result of this struggle to survive, and to the different populations that crossed Ukraine’s territory.