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History of Ternopil


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The city was founded in 1540 by Jan Amor Tarnowski as a military stronghold and a castle. In 1544 the Ternopil Castle was constructed and repelled its first Tatar attacks. In 1548 Ternopil was granted city rights by king Sigismund I the Old. In 1567 the city passed to the Ostrogski family. In 1575 it was plundered by the Tatars. In 1623 the city passed to the Zamoyski family.

In the 17th century the town was almost wiped from the face of the Earth in the Khmelnytsky Uprising which drove out or killed most of its Jewish residents. Ternopil was almost completely destroyed by the Turks and Tatars in 1675 and rebuilt by Aleksander Koniecpolski but did not recover its previous glory until it passed to Marie Casimire, the wife of king Jan III Sobieski in 1690. The city was later sacked for the last time by Tatars in 1694, and twice by Russians in the course of the Great Northern War in 1710 and the War of the Polish Succession in 1733. In 1747 J�zef Potocki invited the Dominicanes and founded the beautiful late-baroque Dominican Church (today the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of The Blessed Virgin Mary of the Ternopil-Zboriv eparchy of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church). The city was thrice looted during the confederation of Bar (1768�1772), by the confederates themselves, by the king's army and by Russians. In 1770 it was further devastated by an outbreak of smallpox.

In 1772 the city came under Austrian rule. In 1809 the city came under Russian rule, which created Ternopol krai there. In 1815 the city (then with 11,000 residents) returned to the Austrian rule in accordance with the Congress of Vienna. In 1820 Jesuits expelled from Polatsk by the Russians established a gymnasium in Ternopil. In 1870 a rail line connected Ternopil with Lviv, accelerating the city's growth. At that time Ternopil had a population of about 25,000.

During World War I the city passed from German and Austrian forces to Russia several times. In 1917 it was burnt
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