The history of Mykolaiv starts with the human settlement of the city, which is believed to have begun around 20,000 years ago during the Upper Paleolithic era. In antiquity, the site inhabited by a Cimmerian settlement known as the Dykyi Sad archaeological site, which was founded around 1250-925 BC. In the medieval era, the area around Mykolaiv was ruled by the Lithuanians under Vytautas the Great, who founded the fortress of Vitovka as a border and an area for diplomacy with the Crimean Khanate. Due to constant fighting over the next few centuries, Mykolaiv would remain sparsely populated as part of the Wild Fields.
Modern-day Mykolaiv was founded in the aftermath of the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, which gave the area to the Russians, with the first permanent re-settlement of Mykolaiv happening in 1784 as "Faberova dacha". In 1787, the dacha's land grant was annulled after Mikhail Faleev chose the area to be the site of a new shipyard in Novorossiya following orders of Grigory Potemkin. The city was formally founded in August 1789 as Nikolaev, which came under the rule of a military governorship after being chosen as the site of the Black Sea Fleet headquarters in 1795, and quickly developed into a major regional naval city. Nikolaev would garner much more significance during the Crimean War, when it was used as a base for Russian troops during the Siege of Sevastopol, and because following the Treaty of Paris the city was allowed to keep its shipyard despite bans on Russian naval items on the Black Sea. In 1862, the port of Nikolaev became a commercial port open to foreign vessels, which facilitated further expansions, especially given the Treaty of London, which allowed the admiralty to be returned to Nikolaev, and the founding of the Black Sea Shipyard. During the Ukrainian War of Independence and the wider Russian Civil War, the city would constantly change hands, notably as part of the Hryhoriv Uprising in May 1919, before falling under Bolshevik control in January 1920. The city was then annexed into the Soviet Union in 1922. During the start of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the city was quickly captured by Nazi Germany from the Soviets, who then deported thousands of citizens, set up the Stalag 364 prisoner-of-war camp, and killed up to 5,000 Jewish citizens as part of the Holocaust. The city was eventually liberated by the Soviets following Ol'shanskiy Landing in 1944.
After the war, Nikolaev would continue to grow due to its shipyards such as Black Sea, Okean, and Mykolayiv, although it remained a closed city. Other companies also opened up, including Zorya-Mashproekt, Nikolaev Alumina Plant, and Dormashina, although this industrialisation started to dry up by the late 1980s. In 1991, Nikolaev became part of a newly independent Ukraine, after which the Ukrainian transliteration Mykolaiv came into wider use. During the early 2000s, many cultural objects were opened while privatisation of the city's economy began. In 2012, the city became the site of mass protests following the murder of Oksana Makar over the perceived corruption of the Ukrainian justice system. Two years later, in 2014, during Euromaidan protests, the city became the site of both large pro-European protests and smaller pro-Russian protests, which culminated in April when pro-Russian separatists attempted to take over the oblast's administration, which was prevented. The city then began to gradually recover, although in the early 2020s the Black Sea Shipyard was declared bankrupt while Okean was put under seizure order. In 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the city was quickly targeted by Russian forces, starting the Battle of Mykolaiv. During the battle, Russian troops began a partial encirclement and seized some ground in the city before having to retreat. Since then, the city has been heavily shelled by the Russians, although at the same time Mykolaiv has also received international aid, most notably from the Danish government.
Early history
Antiquity
It is thought that the area around Mykolaiv was first settled around 20,000 years ago during the Upper Paleolithic era, in part due to its proximity to the sea and relatively mild climate. Numerous settlements dating to the Neolithic era have been found, mostly in a concentration near the Astronomical Observatory of Mykolaiv.
The most major archaeological find from this era before Mykolaiv was permanently settled was in 1927, with the discovery of a Cimmerian settlement that is dated to the Bilozerka culture from around 1250-925 BC, and later went under the name of the Dykyi Sad archaeological site. It is located within the now historic centre of Mykolaiv at the corner of Artyleriiska and Naberezhna streets and is estimated to be around three to four hectares. The initial excavation of the site before the 1950s by Kaminskyi found a bronze cauldron that weighed 37 litres. Further excavations done in the 1950s by Kyiv University would follow, although major excavations of the site would only really begin in the 1990s. These excavations found that the site consisted of a fortified citadel with housing nearby and then rows of housing near the Inhul. Among the most notable items found from the site were a moat that was roughly 90 metres long and two foundations of bridges to the citadel. One of the two bridges, the southern one, is believed to have been constructed in 1250 BC, which would make it one of the oldest known bridges of the type in Eastern Europe. Some of the other finds include numerous bronze objects, bone cheekpieces for bridles, bone shoes used to move across ice, and ceramics.
Due to these finds, some of the excavators that were part of the project have argued that the settlement is the "city of the Cimmerian people" that is mentioned by Homer in the Odyssey, and was also called similar to the Mycenaean fortresses or Troy due to the radial-ring layouts. However, these theories have generally been dismissed as sensationalist and still a hypothesis, although it has been agreed that the site is important for the Bilozerska culture.
Medieval era
The next time the city was significantly recorded was during the medieval era, when Vytautas the Great founded the fortress of Vitovka on the estuary, which is now within the Korabelnyi district of Mykolaiv. Vitovka was part of a series of fortifications that the Lithuanians constructed, such as the fortress of Sokolets near Voznesensk and Ochakiv. The fortress served twofold: on one hand, it was meant to serve as a border against the Crimean-Nogai slave raids, and also act as an area for trade and diplomacy with the Crimean Khanate. Due to this, according to Oksana Hospodarenko, trade in the area near the Black Sea was able to take place, moving from Crimea to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. After the decline of Lithuanian power, the city passed into Ottoman area as de jure part of the Crimean Khanate, although de facto it remained barren and unpopulated as part of the Wild Fields due to constant fighting between Muscovy, Lithuania, and the Khanate. Cossack era The territory of the modern Mykolaiv Oblast were part of the Zaporozhian Sich Bugo-Hard Palanka. According to the 1756 Zaporozhian Host Register only 8,000 people resided here; due to frequent Crimean Tatar raids, they lived predominantly on remote, fortified farmsteads for defensive reasons Реестр Запорожского Войска 1756 года.
Imperial city Founding of Mykolaiv
The founding of the modern city is generally considered to have started as a response to the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca, which ended the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774), giving Russia the area of the Yedisan region between the Bug and Dnieper rivers. After this, Russians began populating the area and constructing ports and shipyards, such as the one in Kherson that was founded in June 1778. The first landholder near Mykolaiv was Franz Fabre, an Austrian merchant based in St. Petersburg. In 1783, he requested the Governor-General of Novorossiya, Grigory Potemkin, to settle at the Bug River an agricultural estate, which was granted in 1784 with 1,500 desyatinas of land. The resulting estate known as the "Faberova dacha" was given at just three kopecks per desyatina, and covered the entire city of modern Mykolaiv. Fabre then built on the estate a main house with a mill, a yacht club, a farmstead, a house, tavern, and smithy.
However, Fabre's control would not last long. By 1787, Potemkin came to the conclusion that Kherson would not be a good area for a shipyard due to the marshes and flooding, and so he tasked Mikhail Faleev with finding a better site for a shipyard in Novorossiya. Faleev would not come near the dacha until that summer, when the Ottomans performed a cross-border raid into Fabre's dacha, killing one, and so Faleev was sent to settle the incident. After arriving, Faleev found that the area would be a good candidate for the proposed shipyard, and so Fabre's land grant was immediately annulled, being returned to the treasury of the Novorossiya Governorate on 2 September 1787.
That summer, navigators went to the Inhul to start, and on 21 July 1788 Faleev was ordered to prepare the shipway for building two fifty-gun ships, with construction started in autumn under engineer I.V. Sokolov. The founding documents of Mykolaiv happened shortly thereafter. By order No. 282 of 27 April 1789, Potemkin told Faleev that "I entrust to your care..the establishment of a wharf on the Inhul". He then followed this up with order no. 1065 of 27 August 1789, which is widely considered the founding date of Mykolaiv. In this order, Potemkin writes "Faberova dacha is to be named Spasskoye, and Vitovka (Bogoyavlenskoye), the newly established wharf on the Inhul, the city of Nikolaev." It is thought that the name Nikolaev traces back to 26 June 1789, when Potemkin in report no. 34 asked Catherine II to found a new monastery known as "Spaso-Nikolaevsky" for soldiers of the Russo-Turkish War (1787–1792) following the recent nearby Siege of Ochakov (1788), which was shortly thereafter approved. Nikolaev was taken from this name for the city, and Spaso was given to Spasskoye later in August. Where exactly the name Nikolaev in the monastery name comes from is heavily disputed, with some saying that it was named after the frigate of Svyatyi Nikolai or the capture of Ochakiv which happened on Saint Nicholas Day. Either way, shortly after Nikolaev's founding, in November 1789, Potemkin in report no. 84 asked Catherine II to grant Nikolaev the status of city under The Charter of the Towns of 1785 (in part, due to its "advantageous place"), although Catherine II denied this because Nikolaev at this point really only had a military population and no ship had been built at the shipyard yet. The first ship was finally laid on 5 January 1790, which was the frigate St. Nicholas, and launched on 25 August 1790 to be towed to Ochakiv for arming. In October 1790, Nikolaev was listed as a Supernumerary town, thus bringing it under the administration of a military governor and not a governorate.
Early years