Chernivtsi

People have lived around Chernivtsi since the Neolithic. A fortified settlement on the left bank of the Prut is thought to date from the Principality of Halych, and after it was destroyed, later settlements grew on the higher right bank, where a fort guarding the river crossing was recorded in 1325. The name Cernăuți first appears in a document of the Moldavian prince Alexander the Good dated 8 October 1408; the town became the centre of Bukovina in 1488 and remained under Moldavian rule, with the Ottomans as overlords, until Austria took Bukovina in 1774–75.

As Czernowitz, it became the capital of the Bukovina District and, from 1849, of the Duchy of Bukovina, an Austrian crownland. German, spread by Habsburg officials and the large Jewish community, became the common language, and the city was a centre of both Ukrainian and Romanian national movements; in 1908 it hosted the first conference on the Yiddish language. It was dubbed Little Vienna.

Romania took the city in November 1918, and by 1930 it had 112,400 people, 44.5 per cent of them Jewish — hence "Jerusalem upon the Prut". Soviet troops occupied it in 1940, and in June 1941 thousands of people were deported from the oblast. After Romanian forces returned, a ghetto was created in August 1941 into which 50,000 Bukovinian Jews were crammed; two-thirds were deported to Transnistria, where most died, while the Romanian mayor Traian Popovici persuaded the dictator Ion Antonescu to exempt about 20,000. After the war the city became part of Soviet Ukraine, and since 1991 it has been the capital of the Chernivtsi Oblast of independent Ukraine.

Chernivtsi was historically one of the most cosmopolitan cities of Central Europe, home to Ukrainians, Romanians, Jews, Germans and Poles, and it still carries its names in several languages: Chernivtsi in Ukrainian, Cernăuți in Romanian and Czernowitz in German. In English it was usually called Czernowitz before 1918, Cernăuți under Romanian rule and Chernovtsy in the Soviet period.

Architecture is the city's signature. Vienna Secession, neoclassical, Baroque and late Gothic buildings stand beside fragments of Ukrainian, Moldavian and Byzantine styles and even Cubism, and the Residence of the Metropolitans, now the university, combines Romanesque and Byzantine forms with tiled roofs that copy the geometric patterns of Ukrainian embroidery. The city has a music and drama theatre named after the writer Olha Kobylianska, a philharmonic, a puppet theatre, a museum of fine arts and memorial museums of writers, and its Star Alley is set into Theatre Square. The writer Karl Emil Franzos grew up here.

Trade has long shaped local life: from 1786 the Saint Peter's Fairs, held from 1 to 15 July, gave the town's markets a new impulse.

Chernivtsi had a population of 264,298 in a 2022 estimate; the 2001 census counted 240,600. It is the administrative centre of its oblast, raion and urban hromada, and a major regional road and rail hub in the south-west of Ukraine, close to the borders with Romania and Moldova.

Ukrainian has become ever more dominant: in 2023, 82 per cent of residents spoke it at home, while the share of Romanian speakers fell to about 2 per cent, and most people who identify as Romanian or Moldovan seemed to speak Ukrainian by 2023. The university, in the former Residence of the Metropolitans, gives the city a large student population.

Trade remains central to the economy. There are 22 markets and smaller markets in the city, which together draw an average of 50,000 visitors a day, served by about 9,100 traders. The city's transit operator introduced electronic fare cards in 2023. Air-raid alerts, mobilisation and the losses of the war shape daily life here as everywhere in Ukraine.

Chernivtsi lies in south-western Ukraine, where maize cooking is characteristic. Maize spread into Ukraine from present-day Moldova and Romania and became most popular in the west, especially in the Carpathians, and maize porridges — banosh, kulesha and mamaliga — are still characteristic of the cooking of south-western Ukraine. Banosh is a cornmeal dish, and brynza is a white cheese of cow's or sheep's milk from the Carpathians.

In the nearby Carpathian Hutsul region, borshch is cooked with fermented white beets and their liquid, onions, carrots, sour cream and Carpathian oregano. Everyday Ukrainian staples — borshch, varenyky dumplings and holubtsi cabbage rolls — are found across the city.

Markets are part of daily food shopping, with 22 markets and smaller markets across the city, among them the Kalynivskyi Market. Cafés and restaurants cluster in the centre around Tsentralna Square and Theatre Square, and French food is among the cuisines on offer.