The Greek Colonies in Ukraine

The sea as well as the steppe brought newcomers to Ukraine. By about 1000 BC, the tiny Greek mainland had become overpopulated by its extraordinarily creative, dynamic, and adventuresome people.

By the 4th century BC, the Greek cities on the Ukrainian coast were booming. Of these, the richest was Olbia. Situated at the mouth of the Buh River, it became the chief center of the grain trade that developed between the Greek homeland and its Black Sea colonies. Other important centers were Chersonesus and Theodosia on the Crimean coast, and Panticapeum (present-day Kerch), the largest of a cluster of cities located on the Cimmerian Bosphorus in eastern Crimea. For several centuries these cities flourished, but by the 2nd century BC they began to encounter serious difficulties. Social strife increased between the urban elites and the lower strata of the population made up largely of liberated slaves. New nomadic invaders upset the stable relationship that had existed with the Scythians. Cheap Egyptian bread undermined the all-important grain trade. And the rise of Rome upset the political balance that had existed in the Hellenistic world.

For about a century, Panticapeum and its neighboring cities, united in the so-called Bosphoran kingdom under the rule of the Spartocid dynasty, managed to hold their own. But in 63 BC, after the last Spartocid, Mithridates VI, was defeated by the Romans, Rome became master of the Black Sea coast.

If, at the dawn of the 1st century AD, we were to cast a panoramic glance at the evolution of human life in Ukraine, we would discern three distinct types of societies inhabiting three different geographic zones. In the northern and northwestern wooded plains lived the agriculturalists. Sheltered from invaders by forests and swamps, these oldest inhabitants of the land were politically unorganized, militarily weak, and sluggish from the point of view of cultural development. But, like peasants everywhere, they had tremendous staying power and, while various overlords might have come and gone, they continued to cling tenaciously to the land that fed them.

Map 4 Greek colonization

In the broad middle zone covered by the steppe, the nomads reigned supreme. In their attempts to control ever-greater expanses of territory, these newcomers from the east created the first major political conglomerates in Ukraine. Culturally cosmopolitan, they brought Ukraine into contact with the major centers of civilization. However, the nomads were each other’s worst enemies since, in their continual quest for pasture and booty, they repeatedly destroyed the political structures created by other nomads.

Finally, on the thin stretch of the Black Sea coast in the south, the Greeks established their advanced urban civilization. Although these cities, with their commerce, crafts, schools, and far-flung contacts, accelerated the cultural development of the vast Ukrainian hinterland, they remained merely an extension of ancient Greece and not an organic part of the Ukrainian environment.