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Nikopol

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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a town of Russia, in the government of Ekaterinoslav, on the right bank of the Dnieper, 70 m. S.S.W. of the town of Ekaterinoslay. It was formerly called Nikitin Rog, and occupies an elongated peninsula between two arms of the Dnieper at a point where its banks are low and marshy, and has been for centuries one of the places where the middle Dnieper can most conveniently be crossed. Its inhabitants, 21,282 in 1900, are Little Russians, Jews and Mennonites, who carry on agriculture and shipbuilding. The old secha, or fortified camp of the Zaporogian Cossacks, brilliantly described in N. V. Gogol's novel Taras Bulba (1834), was situated a little higher up the river. Numbers of graves in the vicinity recall the battles which were fought for the possession of this important strategic point. One of them, close to the town, contained, along with other Scythian antiquities, the well-known precious vase representing the capture of wild horses. Even now Nikopol, which is situated on the highway from Ekaterinoslav to Kherson, is the point where the "salt-highway" of the Chumaks (Little Russian salt-carriers) to the Crimea crosses the Dnieper. Nikopol is, further, one of the chief places on the lower Dnieper for the export of corn, linseed, hemp and wool.