Bila Tserkva began as a frontier stronghold of Kievan Rus', a shield against the nomadic Cumans and Tatars who ranged across the open steppe. Defense was never certain here; a thirteenth-century Mongol invasion devastated the town and exposed the limits of its walls. From around 1363 it belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and after 1569 to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1550 the Voivode of Kyiv built a castle that was then the easternmost fortress on the steppe, and a town gradually grew up around it, despite the constant threat of raids along the notorious Black Trail. Cossacks, Polish nobles, and Muscovite armies all fought over the place. In 1774 it passed to the Branicki family, whose Grand Hetman built residences here and, most famously, laid out the great Oleksandriya park named for his wife.

For a provincial city, Bila Tserkva has an almost improbable roll of native sons and daughters. Here lived Sholem Aleichem, the beloved Yiddish author whose tales of Tevye the Dairyman became the musical Fiddler on the Roof. Here too was born Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the World War II sniper credited with 309 kills, remembered as the most successful female sniper in history. The cosmonaut Pavlo Popovich, the fourth human being ever to reach outer space, came from this city. So did the chess grandmaster David Bronstein; Mikhail Eisenstein, the architect of Riga's finest Art Nouveau facades and father of the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein; and the father of the American "King of Swing," Benny Goodman. Few cities of its size have scattered such a variety of talent across the twentieth century.

For centuries Bila Tserkva was a major center of Jewish life; by the turn of the twentieth century, Jews made up nearly half the population, running workshops and factories and shaping the city's culture. The German army occupied the city from July 1941 until January 1944, and in August 1941 it became the site of the Bila Tserkva massacre, the murder of the city's Jewish population. Among its most harrowing details was the separate killing of nearly a hundred Jewish children, an atrocity so stark that even some German soldiers who witnessed it protested. These were small children, sons and daughters with names and families, and they deserve to be remembered as such. In 2019 the city unveiled a Monument to Jewish Children and the Holocaust, so that what happened here would not be allowed to fade into an abstraction.

Modern Bila Tserkva is the largest city in Kyiv Oblast outside the capital itself, home to some 205,000 people. It sits amid the famously fertile black earth of Europe's breadbasket, and its economy long ago diversified from agriculture into manufacturing of every kind. Traces of every era survive to be walked past: the arcaded Merchant Court of the early nineteenth century, the Palladian Winter Palace of the Branickis, a graceful water tower designed by the engineer Vladimir Shukhov, and the surviving Great Choral Synagogue, now part of the agrarian university. On the old foundations, the church of St. George was rebuilt in the style of an ancient Ruthenian temple, a nod to the long-lost white church that gave the city its name. Beside it all stretches the Oleksandriya arboretum, green and enduring, at the edge of a city that has outlived nearly everything sent against it.