Sumy was born in the middle of the seventeenth century, raised by Cossacks in the frontier land known as Sloboda Ukraine. Its founder was Herasym Kondratyev, a Cossack from Stavyshche who led settlers to the banks of the Psel, a tributary of the great Dnieper. Whether the town took root in 1652 or 1655 is still gently argued by historians, a fittingly modest mystery for a place that began as an outpost rather than a capital. Sloboda Ukraine was a region of self-governing Cossack regiments, communities of free settlers who cleared and defended the borderlands. Sumy grew from that independent stock, a river town that turned slowly from a garrison into a merchant city over the centuries that followed.

The heart of old Sumy is written in its churches. The city center is crowned by the Cathedral of the Saviour's Transfiguration, an eighteenth-century neoclassical pile whose 56-meter bell tower was raised in the 1880s and whose interior glows with frescoes by the painters Vladimir Makovsky and Klavdiy Lebedev. The oldest structure of all is the Resurrection Church of 1702, a survivor from the town's first century. Grander still in ambition was the Holy Trinity Cathedral, begun in 1902 and modeled on Saint Isaac's in Saint Petersburg, its decoration left unfinished when the revolution swept over Russia in 1917. Together these domes and towers trace three centuries of a river town that kept building upward even as its fortunes rose and fell.

Prosperity left Sumy a legacy of collections. The Sumy Regional Art Museum opened in 1920 in a former bank building, gathering nationalized private holdings, and its walls now carry works by Taras Shevchenko, Arkhip Kuindzhi, and Tetyana Yablonska, alongside a Dutch landscape from the circle of Jan van Goyen. The Museum of Local Lore, opened the same year, holds the archaeology and natural history of the region in a nineteenth-century civic building once graced by visiting writers. And on Chekhov Street, the Lintvarev family's old country estate survives as the Chekhov Museum, preserving the very place where the playwright wintered his imagination, and where his brother Nikolai, a painter, died young in 1889, one grief woven quietly into the willows the writer loved.

Sumy carries harder memories as well. During the German occupation of 1941 to 1943, the city suffered terribly. In February 1942, roughly a thousand Jews were murdered here in two mass killings, and in the months after, dozens more Jews and some thirty Roma were killed, followed by hundreds of Hungarian Jews deported to the city. A Nazi prison, a forced-labour battalion, and a prisoner-of-war camp operated within Sumy during those years. These were not statistics but neighbours, families, and children, and the mass graves in the city's cemeteries hold their memory. When liberation came in September 1943, Sumy began, as so many river towns did, the slow work of rebuilding, tending both its restored domes and the quiet ground where its dead lie.