History of Kyiv

In the 1970s, the city was officially designated to have been founded in 482, and thus its 1500th anniversity was celebrated in 1982, but depending on various criteria, the city or settlement may date back at least 2,000 years.^[3] Archaeologists have dated the oldest-known settlement in the area to 25,000 BC.^[4]

Legend recorded in later writings such as the Primary Chronicle has it that Saint Andrew (d. AD 60/70) visited the hilly shores of the Dnieper River and prophesied that a great city would emerge there. The same Chronicle reports another legend asserting that the three brothers Kyi, Shchek and Khoryv and their sister Lybid founded the city and, after the eldest brother Kyi, named it Kyevû (киевъ, amongst many other attested spelling variations). The earliest more reliable evidence suggests it was initially an early medieval Slavic settlement paying tribute to the Khazars.^[5] Reportedly conquered or otherwise acquired by Varangians in c. 880,^[1][5][2] Kyiv would be the capital of medieval Kievan Rus' until 1240.^[6]

From the late 9th century, it gradually acquired eminence as a socio-economic and political center on the crossroads of early Slavic, Varangian (Old Norse), and Finno-Ugric languages and cultures, with a mixture of pagan Slavic, Norse, Christian, Islamic and Jewish religious traditions and influences.^[7] The Christianization of Kievan Rus' would eventually lead to the dominance of Christianity, as well as the adoption of Church Slavonic as the literary standard for communication.^[8] Its political, but not cultural, importance declined after 1169, when the troops of Andrey Bogolyubsky sacked the old town. Numerous sackings of Kyiv by other Rus' princes followed and it was thoroughly devastated in the Mongol invasion of 1240.^{[9][better source needed]}

In the following centuries, the city was a provincial capital of marginal importance on the outskirts of territories controlled by powerful neighbors: the Golden Horde, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, its successor the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Tsardom of Russia, which later became the Russian Empire. Kyiv was also a major center for early modern Ukrainian culture, especially during the Cossack Hetmanate in the 17th–18th centuries, although the administrative capitals in this period of Cossack independence and autonomy were Chyhyryn (1649–1676), Baturyn (1663–1708), and Hlukhiv (1708–1764).

Kyiv prospered in the Russian industrial revolution of the late 19th century. In the conflicts and turbulence that followed the October Revolution of 1917, it became the capital of several short-lived Ukrainian states. From December 1922 on, it was part of the Soviet Union, and from 1934 the capital of Soviet Ukraine. In World War II the city was again destroyed, almost completely, but quickly recovered post-war, to become the third-most important Soviet city and the capital of the second-most populous Soviet republic. It remains the capital of Ukraine, independent since the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.