Horodok (Lviv oblast)

Horodok (Lviv oblast) [Городок]. Map: IV-4. Town (2016 pop 16,218) and raion center in Lviv oblast, situated 30 km from Lviv on the Vereshchytsia River. First mentioned in the Hypatian Chronicle as Solianyi Horodok under the year 1213, in the 13th and 14th centuries it was an important fortified town in the Principality of Galicia-Volhynia. In the early 15th century it received the rights of Magdeburg law. Destroyed by the Tatars in the 1530s, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries it flourished again as a center of trade (salt, cattle, and fish) and culture with a church brotherhood from 1591 and a brotherhood school. During the Cossack-Polish War, the Cossacks and Muscovite troops routed Stanisław Rewera Potocki’s Polish army there in September 1655 (see Battle of Horodok). The town was again destroyed by the Tatars in 1672. The Russian army defeated the Austrian army there in August 1914 after a six-day battle, and in February 1919, during the Ukrainian-Polish War in Galicia, 1918–19, Western Ukrainian and Polish forces fought each other there for control of the Lviv–Peremyshl railway line. Today the town has a clothing industry, a food industry, and a construction industry. Among its architectural monuments are Saint Nicholas’s Church (1510), the wooden Church of Saint John the Baptist (1670), and a Roman Catholic church (15th–18th century).

[This article was updated in 2016.]