The land here changed hands with the violence of its age. Its first known owner was Ostap Dashkevych, the starosta of Kaniv and Cherkasy, a frontier commander of the 16th century. After his death the settlement passed to the Kiev Cave Monastery, a transfer confirmed by King Sigismund I the Old of Poland. But the steppe frontier gave no peace. Tatar raiders came and destroyed the place, and by the middle of that century Trakhtemyriv had emptied out entirely - reduced, the records say, to a single monk keeping vigil at the local monastery. In 1545 the monastery handed the property to the administration of the Kiev Castle. Seven families resettled the ground in 1552, a small human toehold on a landscape that had already been abandoned once. The pattern of settlement and destruction would repeat again and again.

Everything shifted in 1578. That year King Stephen Bathory of Poland organized the Registered Cossacks of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, an official military force drawn from the free warriors of the steppe, and Trakhtemyriv was placed under their administration. Two years earlier, in 1576, a military hospital had already risen beside the monastery - a place for wounded Cossacks to heal or to die. For a frontier that lived and bled by the sword, this small city became a kind of home base, a fixed point in a world of raids and rebellions. In 1621 the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Theophanes III, stopped here on his travels through the Cossack lands, a sign of the town's standing in the Orthodox world. For a few decades, Trakhtemyriv mattered far beyond its size.

Prominence brought a target. Following the Pavlyuk Rebellion, the Polish regular army destroyed Trakhtemyriv in 1637, and in 1678 the Ottoman army did it again. The city that had been the anchor of a military order kept being unmade by the armies of empires larger than itself. It never fully recovered its former weight, sliding from city to village over the centuries that followed. Then came a final erasure of a different kind. When the Kaniv Reservoir filled behind its dam, the water rose over part of the former city - and beneath it, according to the old chronicles, lay the legendary settlement of Zarub, mentioned in the Hypatian Chronicles as far back as 1096 and 1168. Layers of history now rest below the surface, unreachable, in a place most people have left.