The Tomakivka Sich or Tomakivska Sich was a fortification built by the Zaporizhian Cossacks on the island of on the Dnipro near the present-day rural settlement of Chervonohryhorivka and the city Marhanets, probably existed from 1540 until 1593, when it was destroyed by the Crimean Tatars. The Tomakivka Sich was the earliest of the known siches in the Great Meadow of Ukraine.
Origins The sich was founded on Tomakivka, the second-largest island (after Khortytsia) on the Lower Dnipro. The first Sich mentioned in the chronicles is Tomakivska; — it was precisely this island, which at that time was still home only to a settlement, that Marcin Bielski wrote about to Carlo Gambellini, the secretary to the papal nuncio in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in 1584:
The fortifications and the Cossack Rada of that time are described by Bartosz Paprocki in his account of a Polish nobleman Samuel Zborowski. The Sich Cossacks took part in Ukraine's largest Kosiński uprising of 1591–1593, led by Krzysztof Kosiński.
Following the destruction of the Sich by the Tatars in 1593, the Zaporizhian Cossacks moved to the island of Bazavluk and founded the Bazavluk Sich.
According to Mykola Kostomarov, at the end of 1647, following a failed attempt to raise an uprising in the town of Lebedyn, the Chyhyryn centurion Bohdan Khmelnytsky fled here, together with his eldest son Tymofiy Khmelnytsky and 15 Cossacks. It thus became a site of the early phase of the 1648 Khmelnytsky Uprising.
In his 1660 Description of Ukraine, Beauplan wrote:
During the construction of the Kakhovka Reservoir in the 1950s, the island of Tomakivka was partially flooded. A memorial plaque was erected in the 1990s, and in 2016, on the western edge of the beach recreation area on the eroding shore of the Kakhovka Reservoir (coordinates ), the so-called 'reconstruction of the Sich', which was actually intended to be situated further north, on top of a 47-metre-high hill.
Outside the Sich, opposite it across the former Revun channel of the Dnipro, there was a trading town, later the village of Horodyshche (now within the boundaries of the city of Marhanets), in the area of Revun Lane and Kolhospna Street.
See also Chortomlyk Sich Kamianka Sich Nova Sich Zaporizhzhian Sich
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Bibliography
Томаківська Січ // Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Studies : Dictionary part : [in 11 vols.] / Shevchenko Scientific Society ; editor-in-chief prof., Dr. Volodymyr Kubiyovych . — Paris — New York : Young Life , 1980. — Book 2, [vol. 9] : Tymoshenko — Khmelnytskyi Bohdan. — ISBN 5-7707-4049-3. Hurbyk A. Томаківська Січ (Tomakivska Sich) // Small Dictionary of the History of Ukraine / editor-in-chief V. A. Smolii. Kyiv: Lybid, 1997. 464 p. ISBN 5-325-00781-5. Hurbyk A., Томаківська Січ (Томаківська Січ 70-і роки XVI ст. — 1593 рр.) // Cossack Sichs (Essays on the History of the Ukrainian Cossacks, 16th–19th Centuries) / Valerii Andriiovych Smolii (ed.), Vitalii Oleksiiovych Shcherbak (scientific editor), (comp.), Oleksandr Ivanovych Gurzhiy, V. Matyakh, Arnold Leonidovych Sokulskyi, Valeriy Stepanovych Stepanov. — Institute of History of Ukraine, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; Research Institute of the Cossacks. — Kyiv; Zaporizhzhia, 1998. — pp. 22–44.
External links Томаківська Січ // Юридична енциклопедія [Legal Encyclopedia] Volume 6. Гурбик А. О. Томаківська Січ Томаківська Січ в мініатюрі (The Tomakivska Sich in miniature)