May 27, 2025, 1:04 p.m.
(Photo collage: Intent)
The week of May 18-24 in Odesa was marked by a series of events dedicated to the date that researchers define as the city's real birthday.
It is May 19, which historians insist should be considered the city's birthday, because it is the date of the first written mention of the settlement of Kotsiubiiiv, near which the port was later founded, and the city, which at that time was already called Khadzhibey, was allegedly renamed Odesa.
The fact is that there is no document on the foundation of Odesa or the renaming of an existing town to Odesa. Taras Honcharuk, Doctor of Historical Sciences, professor at the Mechnikov National University of Kyiv, is convinced that Odesa should celebrate more than 600 years. This thesis was put forward by Odesa historian Oleksandr Boldyrev in 1991. He explained that the first historical mention of the city was Kotsiubiiiv.
The celebration of the real birthday began on May 17 with the Odesa 610 festival, which lasted five days in the city: from May 17 to 21. This is the second such event in Odesa. Last year, an exhibition of paintings by Odesa artists dedicated to the history of the city and paintings created to mark the 600th anniversary of the first written mention of Kochubii, which later became Khadzhibey and was renamed Odesa by Catherine II, was held at the Odesa Literary Museum on May 18 and 19.
On May 19, the Odesa-610 march took place, and on May 23-24, the Odesa Regional Universal Scientific Library named after M.S. Hrushevsky hosted the Kochubiyev-Khadzhibey-Odesa conference, which was the second such conference in the last 10 years.
"The question of the age of Odesa is not even a question of the date of the city's foundation, it is a much deeper and broader question, because we must teach our generation to look at history soberly, we must first of all refute these Russian narratives about the development of this region by Catherine, that there was nothing about a wild field here, and so on and so forth. We have to take a few steps to rethink not only the political map of that time, but also the ethnogenesis of Ukrainians, because now we have to move away from the canonical Russian perception of this issue. And because of all this, we have to pay much more attention to being much more serious, scientifically grounded and radical in establishing the true dates and establishing the true history, not rewritten, not imposed without burning books, just by scientific denial," said Oleksandr Horodylov, a representative of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, at the conference.
Every year on September 2, Odesa celebrates the City Day. This date is as controversial as the age of the city itself. Officially, Odesa turned 228 years old in 2022, but there is an opinion that the date of the city's foundation should be measured from the first mention of the Khadzhibey fortress, on the site of which the city stands. Then Odesa would be over 600 years old, and the date of its foundation would have to be changed.
Кирило Бойко