Teteria, Pavlo
Teteria, Pavlo [Тетеря, Павло; Teterja] (Morzhkovsky), b ? in Pereiaslav, d ca 1670 in Adrianopolis, Turkey. Hetman of Right-Bank Ukraine. He studied at the Kyivan Mohyla College and was a member of the Lviv Dormition Brotherhood. He married Kateryna (Olena), the daughter of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, in 1660. Until 1648 he was city-court secretary of Volodymyr-Volynskyi, and in 1649 he was appointed chancellor of Pereiaslav regiment. In 1653 he became colonel of the regiment, and in March 1654 he was a member of the Ukrainian mission to Moscow to negotiate the Pereiaslav Treaty of 1654. In 1657–9 he was chancellor secretary to Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky, and in 1658 he participated (with Yurii Nemyrych) in the negotiations aimed at uniting Ukraine with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He then became openly pro-Polish and (with S. Bieniewski) attempted to have the fundamental concept of the Grand Principality of Rus’ stricken from the Treaty of Hadiach. Teteria eventually opposed Vyhovsky and was instrumental in the execution of Vyhovsky and Ivan Bohun by the Poles. He is suspected by some historians (Mykola Kostomarov) of having accused Metropolitan Yosyf Tukalsky-Neliubovych and his brother-in-law, Yurii Khmelnytsky, of treason, which accusation resulted in their imprisonment in the Marienburg Fortress (1664).
Teteria was the hetman of Right-Bank Ukraine in 1663–5. In late 1663 and early 1664 he participated in Jan II Casimir Vasa's campaign in Left-Bank Ukraine. He assisted Stefan Czarniecki's Polish and Tatar forces in fighting against Cossack-led peasant uprisings in Right-Bank Ukraine. In 1665 the leader of the rebellion, Vasyl Drozdenko, destroyed Teteria's army near Bratslav and forced him to resign the hetmancy. Teteria seized the military war chest, the state archive, and the state insignia and fled to Poland, where he converted to Catholicism and was given high administrative posts in Polatsk and the counties of Bratslav, Nizhyn, and Chyhyryn. Soon thereafter he became embroiled in disputes with Polish magnates and fell upon misfortune. Unable to obtain support from the Polish government, he left for Turkey (via Iaşi, in Moldavia) and began plans for an attack on Poland, which were pre-empted by his death.
Arkadii Zhukovsky
[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]