Haidamakas

The haidamakas, also haidamaky or haidamaks (singular haidamaka, Ukrainian: Гайдамаки, Haidamaky) were cossack paramilitary bands in the 18th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The Romanian word haidamac (strong no-good man), may originate from the dialectical Turkish word haydamak (to drive, with the meaning of "to herd [animals]").

Other more ancient exonyms of the same haidamaks include levenetz and deineka. Equivalents of haidamaka include opryshok in Ukrainian Galicia, and hajduk in the Central Europe and the Balkans. The first people to use the term "Haidamaki" to refer to themselves fought in Ustim Karmaluk's uprising of the early 1830s.

Because of the massacres of Jews, Jesuits, Uniates, and Polish nobility, the Polish language term Hajdamactwo became a pejorative label for Ukrainians as a whole. However, Ukrainian folklore and literature generally (with some notable exceptions) treat the actions of the Haidamaki positively. Haidamaky (1841), an epic poem by Taras Shevchenko, treats its subjects both sympathetically and critically.

The haidamak movement comprised mostly local free Cossacks (not members of any Host) and peasantry (kozaky and holota), and rebels. They called themselves Cossacks.

Haidamaks waged war mainly against the Polish nobility and collaborationists in right-bank Ukraine, though the movement was not limited to the right bank only, and they participated in Zaporozhian raids on the Cossack szlachta in Left-Bank Ukraine as well. The latter raids occasionally deteriorated to common robbery and murder, for example in the so-called Matsapura case in the Left Bank in 1734.

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