Qualla: Hadiach

Hadiach: Introduction

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kharkivian, CC BY-SA 3.0. On a quiet bend of the Psel River, pilgrims arrive at an old cemetery to stand before a single grave. It belongs to Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad Hasidism, and his resting place has made this modest Ukrainian city one of the important stops for Hasidic Jews traveling through the country. Hadiach wears its history lightly, but that history runs deep: granted city rights in 1634, it has belonged in turn to a Polish voivodeship, the Cossack Hetmanate, and a Russian governorate, and it once lent its name to a treaty that dreamed of redrawing the map of Eastern Europe. Few towns of its size have been present at so many hinge points.

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Image: Kharkivian | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hadiach: Seat of Hetmans

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Skluesener~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY 2.5. Hadiach came into its own during the age of the Cossack Hetmanate, when it served as a seat of power. It was the residence of Hetman Ivan Briukhovetsky, whose contested election helped split the Hetmanate along the Dnieper River during the long, ruinous period Ukrainians call the...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Skluesener~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY 2.5

Hadiach: The Treaty That Might Have Been

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kharkivian, CC BY-SA 3.0. The city's largest place in history was fixed in September 1658, when the Treaty of Hadiach was signed within it. The agreement proposed something remarkable: to transform the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth into a commonwealth of three nations by adding a Grand Principality of Ru...

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Image: Kharkivian | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hadiach: A City of Thinkers and Writers

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jalyna, CC BY-SA 3.0. Hadiach has given Ukraine minds as well as battles. It was the birthplace of Mykhailo Drahomanov, the nineteenth-century political theorist, historian, and ethnographer whose ideas shaped Ukrainian intellectual life, and of his sister Olena Pchilka, herself a writer and the mothe...

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Image: Jalyna | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hadiach: The Weight of the Wars

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Danielg532, CC BY-SA 4.0. The modern centuries brought harder chapters. During the Second World War, in the late summer of 1943, the German occupiers ran a transit prisoner-of-war camp, Dulag 124, in the town, one of countless such camps that scarred occupied Ukraine and cost many lives. More recently, du...

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Image: Danielg532 | CC BY-SA 4.0