Berdychiv

Berdychiv is a historic city in Zhytomyr Oblast in northern Ukraine and the administrative centre of Berdychiv Raion. It lies 44 kilometres south of the oblast centre Zhytomyr, and its population was estimated at about 73,000 in 2022. The area was inhabited as early as the second millennium BC, with Bronze Age settlements and remains of the Chernyakhov culture, and in 1430 Grand Duke Vytautas of Lithuania granted rights over the land to Kalinik, whose servant Berdich is believed to have founded a remote settlement there. The town received city rights in 1593 under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was an important trading and banking centre until banking moved to Odesa in the middle of the nineteenth century, and it was a major centre of Jewish life and of the development of Hasidism, with about 80 percent of its people Jewish before the Holocaust, during which tens of thousands were murdered. The city has been damaged in the Russian invasion that began in 2022.