Chyhyryn began as a strongpoint on a contested border. The lands had passed from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to the Kingdom of Poland, and in 1589 King Sigismund III granted a privilege allowing a town and castle to be raised on a deserted site called Czehryn. The fortress went up on a hill wrapped by the Tiasmyn, and the town gathered around its foot. In 1592 a further royal grant gave Chyhyryn Magdeburg rights - the coveted charter of self-government - along with a coat of arms bearing three arrows. It was, in those years, a frontier settlement like many others on the edge of the Wild Fields, guarding the seam between the settled world and the open steppe. Nothing about it yet suggested it would one day be a capital.

That transformation came with Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who was connected to this place and made it the center of his power. From 1648 to 1676 Chyhyryn served as the residence of the hetman of the Zaporizhian Host, and after the Orthodox metropolitan see was moved from Kyiv in 1658, it became a full-fledged capital of the Cossack Hetmanate. Metropolitans governed the church from here; hetmans were traditionally installed here. For a brief, intense span, this hilltop town on the Tiasmyn was the political and spiritual heart of a Cossack state - a seat of negotiation and war, where the fate of Ukraine was being decided in real time. The Trinity Monastery, raised nearby in 1627, anchored the sacred side of that authority.

Power like that draws armies, and Chyhyryn's greatness did not last. After the seventeenth century the town declined into a semi-rural quiet, and in 1793 it was absorbed by the Russian Empire in the Second Partition of Poland. Its memory of self-rule flickered once more in 1917, when a congress of Free Cossacks met here and, by tradition, elected Pavlo Skoropadsky their hetman - a man who would soon lead Ukraine itself. Time and successive regimes were hard on the old landmarks: the Trinity Monastery, the town hall, and Khmelnytsky's palace were all destroyed, much of it under Soviet rule. Yet after Ukraine regained independence, the hetman's residence was rebuilt and opened as a museum. On Castle Hill, above the reconstructed fortress, a monument to Khmelnytsky looks out over the river - the capital that was, remembering itself.