Central Ukraine

The middle Dnipro has been farmed since the Trypillia culture, whose remains are part of Cherkasy Oblast's heritage. The region lay on the edge of the steppe for centuries after the Mongol invasions, and under Polish-Lithuanian rule its frontier towns and estates became the cradle of the Cossacks, free men who lived by farming, raiding and war.

In 1648 Bohdan Khmelnytsky, whose family estate was at Subotiv, led the uprising against the Polish Commonwealth that created the Cossack Hetmanate, with its capital at Chyhyryn. The following decades of civil war, known as the Ruin, devastated the right bank. At Poltava in 1709 Peter the Great defeated Charles XII of Sweden and Hetman Ivan Mazepa, a turning point for Russian power and for Ukrainian autonomy, which was abolished within the century. The right bank, including Uman, stayed Polish until 1793; in 1768 the Koliivshchyna rebellion massacred Poles and Jews in Uman.

The 19th century brought sugar estates, railways and a Jewish population concentrated in towns such as Uman and Vinnytsia. The Holodomor of 1932–33 fell heavily on the region's villages, and in the Second World War the Uman and Korsun pockets were scenes of huge battles, while the region's Jews were murdered in mass shootings. Hitler's Werwolf headquarters stood near Vinnytsia. In 2016 Kirovohrad was renamed Kropyvnytskyi as part of Ukraine's removal of Soviet names.

Central Ukraine is often described as the most typically Ukrainian part of the country: its speech formed the basis of the standard literary language, and its villages of whitewashed houses, cherry orchards and embroidered towels are the images of national folk culture. Ivan Kotliarevsky, born in Poltava, wrote the Eneida in 1798, the first major work in modern vernacular Ukrainian, and Mykola Gogol, born in Velyki Sorochyntsi, filled his early stories with Poltava village life. Taras Shevchenko, born a serf in the Cherkasy lands, is buried at Kaniv, which has become a place of national pilgrimage.

Crafts are strongly regional. Opishnia in Poltava Oblast is the best-known centre of Ukrainian pottery, Reshetylivka is famous for white-on-white embroidery and carpet weaving, and the Sorochyntsi Fair, set in Gogol's village, revives the market fairs he described. Kropyvnytskyi is proud of its role in the birth of professional Ukrainian theatre in the 1880s.

The region is mainly Orthodox. Uman is also a place of Jewish pilgrimage: each year around Rosh Hashanah, tens of thousands of Hasidic Jews come to pray at the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, who died in the town in 1810, and the pilgrimage has continued in some form since the war began.

Vinnytsia, with about 370,000 people, is the largest city, followed by Poltava, Cherkasy and Kropyvnytskyi, each with roughly 220,000 to 290,000, and the industrial river city of Kremenchuk. Smaller towns such as Uman, Myrhorod and Oleksandriia serve wide farming districts, and many villages have lost people to the cities and abroad.

Agriculture is the economic core. The region's black earth grows wheat, maize, sunflowers and sugar beet, and food processing, from sugar refineries to confectionery and dairies, is a major employer. Kremenchuk grew around its oil refinery, damaged in 2022, and the KrAZ truck factory, Poltava Oblast produces oil and gas, and Kropyvnytskyi has engineering works.

Life follows a provincial rhythm of markets, allotments and early evenings, now overlaid with sirens, curfews and power cuts. Displaced families from the east and south have settled across the region, and, as elsewhere in Ukraine, war funerals and volunteer collections for the front are part of every town's routine.

This is the land of classic Ukrainian home cooking. Poltava is identified with halushky, soft wheat dumplings boiled and served with sour cream, fried onion or pork crackling, and the city has a monument to them. Varenyky with potato, soft cheese, cabbage or sour cherries, beetroot borscht with pampushky garlic rolls, and holubtsi cabbage rolls are everyday dishes, while nalysnyky, thin pancakes rolled around sweet cheese, are a favourite for breakfast or dessert.

Pork and salo are central, cured, smoked or fried, and home-made kovbasa sausage appears at every festive table. The river and reservoirs supply carp and pike, and the orchards cherries, apples and plums for preserves and dried-fruit uzvar. At Christmas Eve the meal begins with kutia, boiled wheat mixed with poppy seeds, honey and nuts.

Sugar beet made the region a centre of confectionery, and honey, sunflower oil and poppy-seed rolls are local staples. Myrhorod, a spa town, bottles a mineral water sold across Ukraine, and home-distilled spirits and fruit liqueurs are traditional in the villages.

In Cherkasy Oblast, the Sofiyivka park at Uman is the region's best-known sight, a romantic landscape park of lakes, cascades, grottoes and an underground river laid out from 1796. Uman also has the pilgrim quarter around Rabbi Nachman's grave. On the Dnipro, Kaniv's Taras Hill holds Shevchenko's grave and museum above the river, Chyhyryn preserves the hill of Khmelnytsky's fortress, Subotiv his family church, and the Kholodnyi Yar forest is remembered for rebels of the 18th and 20th centuries.

Vinnytsia has its Roshen fountain on the Southern Bug, a walkable old centre and the Pirogov estate on the outskirts, with the surgeon's embalmed body in a nearby church crypt; the ruins of Hitler's Werwolf headquarters lie north of the city, and the Potocki palace at Tulchyn to the south-east.

Poltava's sights are the 1709 battlefield, the semicircular Neoclassical central square with its column marking the battle's centenary, the Kotliarevsky museum and the Exaltation of the Cross monastery. Elsewhere in the oblast are the pottery workshops and museum of Opishnia, Gogol's Velyki Sorochyntsi, Dykanka and the spa town of Myrhorod. Kropyvnytskyi, further south-west, has the earthworks of the Fortress of St Elizabeth and a theatre-centred old town.