Krasnystaw

Krasnystaw (Ukrainian: Красностав; Krasnostav). Map: III-4. City (2006 pop 19,434) in the Kholm region on the Vepr River (Wieprz River), now in Lublin voivodeship, Poland. One of the oldest cities of the Kholm region, it was an important center (known as Shchekariv) in the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia. It is mentioned in the Galician-Volhynian Chronicle of the 13th century. At the end of the 14th century it came under Polish rule, and in 1394 the city was granted the rights of Magdeburg law. The city prospered in the 15th and 16th centuries, when it was a major stop on the trade route between Right-Bank Ukraine and the Baltic port of Gdańsk (Danzig), but it entered a long period of decline in the 17th century. A Uniate Gothic-style church was built there in the 1540s, but neither the Uniates nor the sizable Ukrainian Orthodox population could withstand the Polonizing pressures. In 1940 there were only about 5,000 Polonized Ukrainians (kalakuty) living in the Krasnystaw district, and they were forcibly resettled to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1945–6.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]