'THE COSSACKS'

Nicolay Gogol created the novel "Taras Bulba", the finest epic in Russian Literature. "...In this short work, he visualized a romantic ideal of free-living Cossacks which, if far from perfect, seemed to him infinitely preferable to the grey tedium of city life peopled with spiritless bureaucrats..." (John Cournos)

Gogol was Ukrainian; Cossack blood flowed through his veins. He saw the Ukrainian Cossacks as a heroic people forever fighting off invaders and struggling to gain an identity independent of their immediate neighbours.

"...had there been a real frontier of mountain or sea, the people who settled here on the Steppes might have formed a definite political body. Without this natural protection it became a land subject to constant attack and despoliation..." (Nicolay Gogol)

Look to the north to Russia, to the east to the Tatars, to the south to the Turk or to the west to Poland and you see a nation hungry for expansion. This constant menace shaped the lifestyles of the people who inhabited the Steppes of Ukraine - fugitives, homeless, with nothing to lose, their lives ever exposed to danger. They were forced to forsake their peaceful occupations and transform into a warlike people fighting desperately for survival. These people were known as Cossacks whose name derives from the Turkish "Kazak" meaning "nomad".

Their appearance at the end of the 12th century coincided with the appearance in Europe of brotherhoods and knighthood-orders. If the Cossacks warred for their existence, they warred no less for their faith. In 988, Prince Volodymyr embraced the Christian faith and looked, initially, to the Greek Orthodox Church for its dogma. Indeed, as the Cossack nation grew stronger, their struggle for identity assumed the nature of a religious war against the 'non-believer'.

Little by little the communities grew, until the whole of Ukraine united under the protection of the Cossacks. In 1648, under Bohdan Hmelnytsky, the first free Ukrainian State was proclaimed. The Cossacks had gained legitimacy and became a force that none of their neighbours was able to ignore. They shaped the history of the region until Katherine II of Russia finally obliterated them from the Steppes of Ukraine in 1775.

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