Catherine’s Yekaterinoslav became Dnipro on the Dnieper
Dnipro is Ukraine’s fourth-largest city, about one million people, 391 km southeast of Kyiv on the Dnieper. Cossack settlement shows from at least 1524; imperial Yekaterinoslav—“glory of Catherine”—was decreed later. Renamed Dnipropetrovsk in 1926 for Grigory Petrovsky, it was a Stalinist industrial showcase before post-1991 Ukrainian identity shifts.
People lived here from the Palaeolithic; Cimmerian traces lie near today’s Taras Shevchenko Park, and the site later belonged to Kievan Rus’ and then the Golden Horde. Finds in Samarskyi District show a trading post at the river crossing from at least 1524, and in August 2026 the council adopted 1526 as the official founding year in place of 1776. In 1635 the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth raised Kodak Fortress above the Dnieper rapids, only for Ivan Sulyma’s Cossacks to wreck it within months; rebuilt in 1645, it fell to the Zaporozhian Sich in 1648, and a Cossack town of at least 3,000 called New Kodak grew around it.
The Cossacks helped Catherine II win the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74 and were then ordered to disband. Yekaterinoslav is first mentioned in a governor’s report to Potemkin on 23 April 1776, but the first town, built in 1777 where the Samara meets the Kilchen, turned into a bog each spring. Paul I renamed it Novorossiysk from 1796, Alexander I restored the old name in 1802, and in 1918 the Ukrainian People’s Republic proposed Sicheslav, which was never finalised.
Before the German occupation more than a third of residents were Jewish. After the war nuclear, arms and space plants made it a closed city, which Western media nicknamed the Rocket City.
The 2015 decommunization law forced a change. On 29 December 2015 the council tried rededicating the name to Saint Peter, but on 19 May 2016 parliament voted 247 to 16 to rename it Dnipro, while the province, fixed in the constitution, stays Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. Since 2001 the seal of the Cossack Kodak Palanka has appeared on the coat of arms, and since 2022 the city has been a hub for aid and displaced people.
Source: Dnipro
