Uman

Uman first appears in documents in 1616, a privately owned town of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth that served as a fort against Tatar raids and housed a Cossack regiment. In 1648 the Cossacks of Bohdan Khmelnytsky took it, and it became the seat of their regiment; Poland retook it in 1667, many residents fled east, and between 1670 and 1674 it was the residence of the hetman of right-bank Ukraine. Under the Potocki family, owners from 1726 to 1832, it grew in wealth and importance, with a Basilian monastery and school.

The region saw haidamak uprisings in 1734, 1750 and 1768. In the last, the Koliivshchyna, the rebels Maksym Zalizniak and Ivan Gonta took Uman and massacred Jews, Poles and Ukrainian Uniates; Polish sources put the dead at about 20,000. Count Stanisław Szczęsny Potocki rebuilt the town and in 1796 began the Sofiyivka park. After the Second Partition of Poland in 1793 Uman passed to Russia, and in 1810 Rebbe Nachman of Breslov spent the last months of his life here and asked to be buried in the town. Railways to Kyiv and Odesa brought industry, and the population passed 50,000 by 1914.

In 1941 the Germans encircled Soviet armies near the town in the Battle of Uman and occupied it until March 1944; around 17,000 Jews were murdered and the Jewish cemetery destroyed. Since independence the pilgrimage has grown into the city's main industry. On 24 February 2022 Russian artillery hit the city, and on 28 April 2023 a missile strike on a residential building killed at least 23 people.

For Ukrainians, Uman is bound up with Taras Shevchenko's longest poem, Haidamaky of 1841, which retells the uprising of 1768. For gardeners and scientists it is the home of Sofiyivka, a research institute of the National Academy of Sciences as well as a park, and of the University of Gardening; for many Jews around the world it is simply the place of Rebbe Nachman's grave.

The Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage dates from 1811, when Nathan of Breslov, the rebbe's foremost disciple, organised the first. Hundreds came each year until the Soviet border closed; a few continued in secret, some at the cost of exile to Siberia. It resumed on a small scale in 1948, and after the Cold War grew to tens of thousands, with more than 30,000 pilgrims in 2018, drawn from many parts of the ultra-Orthodox world. The grave area was protected by presidential decree in 1994, though in 2024 the city council reduced the protected zone.

Away from the pilgrim quarter, the city's life is that of a provincial Ukrainian town, with a Catholic church that recalls the Polish past.

About 81,500 people lived in Uman in 2022. It is the administrative centre of Uman Raion in Cherkasy Oblast and the hub of a farming district, and its institutions — the Pavlo Tychyna pedagogical university, the University of Gardening, a campus of the European University and the Sofiyivka research institute — bring students and staff.

The annual pilgrimage is regarded as the city's main economic industry. A small but growing Jewish population has lived around the grave on Pushkina Street since the 1990s. For much of the year Sofiyivka is the city's other draw, with about 300,000 visitors a year.

Daily life follows a provincial rhythm of markets such as Meshchanka, city buses and walks in the park. Since 2022 it has been shaped by air-raid alerts and martial law, and by the missile strike of April 2023 on a residential building, which killed at least 23 people, including six children.

Uman eats the food of central Ukraine. Red borscht, a soup of beets, cabbage, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, onions, garlic and dill, is often served with pampushky, soft bread rolls topped with garlic butter. Varenyky, dumplings of thin, soft dough most often filled with potato, and holubtsi, cabbage rolls, are everyday dishes, and halushky, pieces of steam-boiled leavened dough served in soups or on their own, are another traditional Ukrainian dish.

Deruny, potato pancakes with sour cream, and syrnyky, fried quark fritters served with sour cream, jam or honey, are favourites at breakfast and in canteens, while salo, cured pork fat, kovbasa sausage and kholodets, a meat aspic, appear on holiday tables. The city's food markets sell the produce of the surrounding farmland.

Kapusniak, a soup of cabbage, pork, salo and beans served with sour cream, is a winter standby, and in summer kholodnyk, a cold beet soup blended with soured milk or kefir and served with a hard-boiled egg, is a lighter alternative. Kvass, a fermented drink known since the days of Kyivan Rus, and horilka, the Ukrainian spirit, are the traditional drinks.