Cherkashchyna
Черкащина
....and pretty blue churches. Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s poet and national hero, was born and grew up in Cherkashchyna.
People have inhabited this region since the time immemorial. The oldest objects excavated on the territory of the region date back to the Stone Age – the Paleolithic period. More than 40 thousand years ago, the 
primitive inhabitants of the region used flint and bones of gigantic animals (mammoths, fleecy rhinoceroses, and bisons) as tools for land-tilling and hunting, and made dwelling out of them.
Some six thousand years ago Trypillian settlements were numerous in this area. Many were quite big, with populations of 15-20,000, making them some of the largest settlements in the world at that time. Trypillian people practiced plowing and cattle-breeding, produced highly-developed ceramics (they are known for their elaborately-decorated pottery), textile weaving, and other crafts.
The Cherkasy region was the southern borderland of Kyivan Rus, and there were many fortresses built here. In later years, there were many Kozak fortresses and towns built here, to protect the people from Tatar invaders, to escape from serfdom and to fight Polish and Russian hegemony.
People settled here because the land was so rich–it was chornozem (black earth). Under Russian and 
Polish rule, the land was controlled by aristocratic landowners, and the peasants were all serfs, slaves tied to the land. In 1861, serfdom was finally abolished, and the area became a region of industrious land-owning peasants with small, but very productive farms. Because of them, Ukraine was the breadbasket of Europe.
The chornozem proved a curse under Soviet rule. Stalin ordered collectivization of the farms, and he peasants resisted. He brought about the Holodomor, an artificial famine which killed more than 4 million Ukrainian 
peasants and destroyed the health of many more.
Soviet rule also destroyed much of the folk culture of the Cherkasy region (and of eastern and central Ukraine). Forced Russification tried to extirpate the language of Shevchenko, and anti-religious policies disallowed folk celebrations and folk practices even remotely tied to christianity--like the writing of pysanky. Mytsyk and Fusyn were able to find some pysankarky in central Cherkasy oblast who were still writing traditional designs and to preserve them. But so very, very much has been lost.
Land of Shevchenko
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