Khotin

Khotin (khətyēn`), city, SW Ukraine, on the Dniester River. It lies in Bessarabia in an agricultural district and has agricultural and food-processing industries. Located on the site of an ancient fortified Slavic settlement, the city is named for Kotizon, a 3d-century Dacian chief. It was included in Kievan Rus in the 10th cent. and later became part of the Halych and Halych-Volhynian duchies. Khotin developed into an important trade and craft center and in the 13th cent. was the site of a Genoese trading colony. The city was included in the Hungarian and Moldavian states in the 14th and 15th cent. Its strategic location at an important Dniester River crossing caused the city to change hands frequently from the 16th to 18th cent. Seized by Russia in 1739, Khotin was incorporated into the Russian Empire in 1812 as part of Bessarabia. The city was under Romanian rule from 1918 to 1940 and under German occupation from 1941 to 1944. Khotin has remains of an imposing fortified castle that was built (13th cent.) by the Genoese, enlarged (14th–15th cent.) by the Moldovans, and restored (18th cent.) by the Ottoman Turks.

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Khotin 

a city and the administrative center of Khotin Raion, Chernovtsy Oblast, Ukrainian SSR. Khotin is situated on the Dnestr River, 20 km from the Kamenets-Podol’skii railroad station on the Larga-Grechany line.

The first references to Khotin date from the tenth century, at which time it was part of Kievan Rus’. It was ruled by the Galician Principality in the 12th century, and in 1199 it became part of the Galician-Volynian Principality. After 1300, Khotin belonged at different times to Moldavia, Turkey, and Poland.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, Khotin was a strong Turkish fortress; several major battles were fought near the city. Between Sept. 2 and Oct. 9, 1621, the 65,000 Polish and Ukrainian troops under the Lithuanian grand hetman, J. K. Chodkiewicz, and the Ukrainian hetman, P. K. Sagaidachnyi, inflicted a series of defeats on Sultan Osman IPs Turkish army of 120,000 to 150,000 men. On Nov. 11, 1673, Polish troops under the grand hetman of the crown, Jan Sobieski, routed Hussayn Pasha’s Turkish army of 65,000. During the Russo-Turkish wars, Khotin was seized by the Russians in 1739, 1769, 1788, and 1807.

Khotin passed to the Russian Empire under the Bucharest Peace Treaty of 1812. It became a city in 1818 and the administrative center of a district in Bessarabia Province in 1873. It was captured by Rumania in 1918, and an uprising against the Rumanian occupation broke out in the Khotin region in the following year (see). On June 28, 1940, Khotin was incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR as part of northern Bucovina and became the administrative center of a raion. The city was occupied by fascist German troops from June 6, 1941, to April 4, 1944.

Khotin has a brewery, a creamery, a brickyard, a lumber combine, and a factory producing art objects. Its educational and cultural institutions include an agricultural technicum and a people’s museum of revolutionary history.

Khotin’s architectural landmarks include a castle, which dates from the 13th to 15th centuries and was rebuilt in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the 15th-century palace of a prince. There is also a monument to the Komsomol underground of Khotin (concrete, 1969, sculptors M. V. and R. B. Flit, architect A. K. Egorov).

REFERENCES

Tymoshchuk, B. O. Khotyn: Putivnyk. Uzhgorod, 1972.
Khotinskii istoriko-kraevedcheskii muzei: Putevoditel’. Uzhgorod, 1974.