Okhtyrka

Okhtyrka Охтирка
City
Flag Seal
Okhtyrka
Coordinates: 50°11′30″N 34°57′00″E / 50.19167°N 34.95000°E / 50.19167; 34.95000
Country	Ukraine
Oblast	Sumy
Founded	1641
Area
• Total	30 km2 (10 sq mi)
Elevation	110 m (360 ft)
Population (January 1, 2004)
• Total	50,100
Website	City website

Okhtyrka (Ukrainian: Охтирка; also known by its Russian variant Akhtyrka Russian: Ахтырка) is a small city in Ukraine, a raion (district) centre within Sumy Oblast (region) since 1975. Okhtyrka is a town of Hussar and Cossack Fame. It was also once a regional seat of Sloboda Ukraine and the Ukrainian SSR. Since the discovery of oil and gas in 1961 Okhtyrka has become an "oil capital of Ukraine". It is home to Okhtyrka air base, historical and religious places of interest. Population 50,400 (as of 2001^[update]), 25,965 (1900), 17,411 (1867).

The villages of Velyke Osero (274 inhabitants), Saluschany (28 inhabitants), Prystan (7 inhabitants) and Kosyatyn (6 inhabitants) belong to the Okhtyrka city administration which is designated into a separate subdivision of the Sumy Oblast.

There are many versions of the city's name origin. According to one of them, the most probable, its name descends from the name of the river with the same name that flows through the city. According to some local historians, the river's name in translation from Turkic language means "lazy river". In opinion of others, the city's name from the same Turkic language is translated as the "place of ambush", "white fort". Yet the Russian philologist Oleg Trubachyov considered that there are no serious grounds to accept the Turkic etymology and that the river's name is "insufficiently clear in origin".

The linguist Kostiantyn Tyshchenko points to the Gothic origin of the name "Okhtyrka".

Located in the south of the Sumy region in the center of a triangle created by regional centers – Sumy, Kharkiv and Poltava. The city is situated on the left bank of the Vorskla River – the blue pearl of Ukrainian rivers.

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Wikipedia