Qualla: Samar

Samar: Introduction

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sergiy Klymenko, CC BY-SA 3.0. A city can be renamed. Whether it forgets is another question. For most of living memory this place on the right bank of the Samara River was called Novomoskovsk, but in 2024 Ukraine's parliament handed it back the name its Cossack founders had used: Samar. The word is older than the empire that changed it, older even than the failed 1777 experiment when planners tried to build a city here and named it Yekaterinoslav, "the glory of Catherine," only to watch spring water turn the ground to bog. Twenty-seven kilometers from the regional capital of Dnipro, Samar carries its layered names the way its river carries silt, downstream from everything that came before.

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Image: Sergiy Klymenko | CC BY-SA 3.0

Samar: A Town With Four Names

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Skoropadsky, CC BY-SA 4.0. The first Samar rose at the end of the seventeenth century, a Cossack settlement that gave its name to a whole administrative district of the Zaporozhian lands. In 1688 the Cossacks abandoned that original site, now called Old Samar, when the Russian tsardom raised the Bohorodyts...

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Image: Skoropadsky | CC BY-SA 4.0

Samar: The Wooden Cathedral

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Skoropadsky, CC BY-SA 4.0. Rising above the town's rooftops is one of the most remarkable pieces of folk architecture in Ukraine: the Trinity Cathedral, built entirely of wood between 1772 and 1781 by the Zaporozhian Cossacks. It is the only surviving wooden nine-domed church in the country, its central do...

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Image: Skoropadsky | CC BY-SA 4.0

Samar: The People of the River Bend

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gnesener1900, CC BY-SA 3.0. By the 2001 census the city counted 71,860 residents; on the eve of the 2022 invasion the figure stood near 69,855. The community is overwhelmingly Ukrainian, more than eight in ten, with a substantial ethnic Russian minority and smaller numbers of Belarusians, Germans, Armenians...

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Image: Gnesener1900 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Samar: Reclaiming the Old Name

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrii bondarenko, CC BY-SA 3.0. Names became a battleground again after 2022. With Russian forces invading the country, a city called Novomoskovsk, "new Moscow," carried a resonance many residents no longer wanted. In January 2024 the city council voted to rename it Nova Samar. That September, Ukraine's Verkhov...

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Image: Andrii bondarenko | CC BY-SA 3.0