Draft:Great Meadow

• Comment: The title of this draft either has been disambiguated or will need to be disambiguated for acceptance.
  If this draft is accepted, an entry will need to be added to the disambiguation page for the primary name.
  The disambiguation page for the primary name is Great Meadows (disambiguation). Robert McClenon (talk) 03:46, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

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For the national park, see Great Meadow National Nature Park.

The Great Meadow (Ukrainian: Великий Луг, romanized: Velykyj Luh, sometimes translated as "the Great Valley") is a historical name used in Eastern European documents to refer to a semi-forested reed bed which used to exist on the left-bank of the Dnipro river, between the Dnipro and Konka rivers. It stretched from the Khortytsia island to around the site of Mykytyns'ka Sich. It had an area of over 10 thousand square kilometres. This area was controlled by the Zaporozhian Sich, and made up the core territory of it. It was later flooded after the construction of the Kakhovka Reservoir, with some exceptions that became the national park mentioned above.

Map of the Great Meadow from 1894

Geography

According to Dmytro Yavornytsky, the Great Meadow stretched for over a hundred kilometres in length, and 25 km in maximum width, with an additional 180 km down to the town of Oleshky, although the latter part was not entirely continuous and much narrower. The meadow was quite forested, with oaks predominating. The nearby islands on the Dnipro were also forested.

Significance

The Zaporozhian Sich, an important Ukrainian polity, was based around the Great Meadow. It provided a relatively safe and secure space for the Zaporozhian Cossacks to live, hunt wild game, fish and feed cattle. Lumber and firewood could easily be gathered, which aided greatly in the Sich's development. As such, the Great Meadow is associated with ideas of freedom and safety in Cossack Dumas and folk tales, and was often called "Father" in them:

Ой Січ — мати, а Великий Луг — батько,
Що в Лузі заробити, то в Січі пропити.

Oh, the Sich - my mother, and the Great Meadow - my Father,
What you earn in the Meadow, you spend in the Sich.

—Zaporizhian folk song

Flora and fauna

Because the Great Meadow was surrounded on all sides by the Steppe, it was a reliable source of water for many animals, and it provided shelter from steppe fires - which were common - and as such bore host to many different species of animals, plants and insects: wolves, hogs, deer, wild goat, foxes, rabbits, badgers, stoats, spermophiluses (susliks), beavers and martens. Occasionally, during autumn, wild horses would wander in. In spring, fish would swim in from the Black Sea to spawn and the Great Meadow would serve as an excellent place for these fish to do so. It was an excellent nursery habitat. According to folk tales, the Dnipro would be so full of fish in the spring, that if one were to set a spear in the river, it would stay upright and float due to it hitting numerous fish. Birds were also extremely common, as were bees.

See also

• Zaporozhian Sich
• Great Meadow National Nature Park
• Wild Fields