Podilsk

Podilsk is a city in Odesa Oblast in southern Ukraine and the administrative center of Podilsk Raion, one of the oblast's seven districts; it also hosts the administration of Podilsk urban hromada. It is the largest city in the northern part of the oblast, with a 2022 estimate of 39,220 people, down from 40,718 in 2001. Known earlier as Birzula, it first appears in Ottoman documents in 1772 as a settlement of the Dubossar raya, and the physicist Gleb Wataghin was born there in 1899. In 1935 it was renamed Kotovsk after the Soviet military leader Grigori Kotovsky, who was buried in a mausoleum in the city that was later destroyed during the Romanian administration of Transnistria. The Verkhovna Rada renamed the city Podilsk in May 2016 under Ukraine's decommunization laws, and in July 2020, as part of the administrative reform that cut the oblast to seven raions, the city was merged into Podilsk Raion.