Kovalchuk

Kovalchuk stands on koval, the Ukrainian word for a smith, with an ending that marked a man as the son of a blacksmith or as apprenticed to one; the ring of spellings around it, Kavalchuk in Belarusian, Kowalczuk in Polish, Covalciuc in Romanian, is the first clue to where it sits.

It sits in Volhynia, a region caught between southeastern Poland, southwestern Belarus and northwestern Ukraine, whose borders were never cleanly drawn. It covers Volyn and Rivne Oblasts and the edges of Zhytomyr, Khmelnytskyi and Ternopil, though only Volyn still carries the name outright, and its towns are Lutsk, Rivne, Kovel and Volodymyr. It lies on the northern shoulder of the Volhynian-Podolian Upland and the western edge of the Polesian Lowland, in the basins of the Western Bug and the Pripyat, so most of its rivers run north or west.

The Primary Chronicle records the Dulebes, the Buzhans and the Volhynians here. In 983 Vladimir the Great set his son Vsevolod over the Volhynian principality, and in 988 founded the city of Volodymyr, which gave the region a second name, Lodomeria. That name outlived the principality: Andrew II of Hungary, pressing his claim over Galicia and Volhynia, took the style King of Galicia and Lodomeria, and Hungary's kings were still using it in 1918.

Volhynia and Galicia were joined and pulled apart repeatedly, united under Roman the Great from 1199 to 1205 and broken in the War of the Galician Succession. When the joint polity disintegrated around 1340 the region was carved between two states, Poland taking western Volhynia and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania the east, in a division settled between 1352 and 1366. Poles and Jews came in numbers, and Orthodox parishes went over to the Greek Catholic body for its better standing in law. After 1569 the whole of it was organised as a voivodeship of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Commonwealth ground it stayed for two centuries.

North of the farmland the ground gives out into Polissia, the flatland lining the Pripyat and fed by the Horyn, the Stokhid and the Styr, with the Pinsk Marshes at its swampiest heart. The Pripyat and the Western Bug systems were joined at last by the Dnieper-Bug Canal, cut in the reign of the Commonwealth's last king.

The two regions overlap rather than adjoin. The nineteenth-century Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland drew Polesie as a triangle between Brest, Mogilev and Kyiv and set Volhynian Polesia among its southern divisions, lapping over northern Volhynia outright. The wet ground outlasted the region's rulers: much of it was reclaimed for farmland only between the 1960s and the 1980s, and the eastern end took the Chernobyl fallout.

The partitions took the region apart again. Austria annexed a southwestern corner in 1772, and after the third partition of 1795 the eastern and central parts became the Volhynian Governorate of the Russian Empire, with its centre at Zhytomyr. All of Volhynia was placed inside the Pale of Settlement, and the empire set about the religion of the place, liquidating the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and handing its buildings to the Russian Orthodox Church.

What the empire could not do was make the province Russian. Its own schooling reform put an educational district here under Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, run by Tadeusz Czacki, and out of it came the Kremenets Lyceum and a network of Polish schools that raised the standing of Polish instead. The census of 1897 counted 2,989,482 people: 73.7 percent East Slavs, mostly Ukrainians, 400,000 Jews, 6.2 percent Poles and 5.7 percent Germans, in the empire's most rural western province.

The First World War was fought across it, Austrians, Germans and the Polish Legions against Russia. The Ukrainian Sich Riflemen stationed here found a population whose national feeling was thin, many still calling themselves Rus or Little Russian, and answered it by opening Ukrainian schools. When the Ukrainian People's Republic was declared the front line cut Volhynia in half just west of Lutsk, and after the sack of Kyiv the government of Ukraine fell back here.

The Peace of Riga split it again in 1921, Poland keeping the larger share as the Volhynian Voivodeship with its capital at Lutsk, the Soviet side going to the Ukrainian SSR. Poland settled soldiers on bought-up land, about 100,000 osadniks by 1937, who mixed so little with the Ukrainian majority that no real Polonisation followed; on the Soviet side the deportations of the 1930s carried people out to Siberia.

Then the worst of it. After the pact of 1939 the Soviet Union occupied the Polish part and the German minority was moved west; under German occupation most of the region's Jewish population, about 460,000 people, was murdered, the main massacre falling between August and October 1942. In 1943 up to 100,000 Poles in Volhynia were killed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Soviet Ukraine took the whole region after the war, and since the Soviet Union dissolved it has been an integral part of Ukraine.

Victoria Kovalchuk was born at Kovel on 26 January 1954, to a family of Polish roots, an official and a doctor, which is a fair account of what Volhynia had become by then. She won national literary contests while still at school, then went west into Galicia, studying at the Ukrainian Polygraph Institute from 1972 to 1978 and made her life in Lviv, absorbing the traditions of the Polish, Hebrew and Russian communities that had lived there together for centuries.

She headed the book design department at the Polygraph Institute, ran design at the publishing house The Highest School and lectured at the Ukrainian Design Academy, illustrating about two hundred books, more than thirty for children. Her ABC took a First Degree Diploma at the 2000 Ukrainian Art Books contest and was reprinted nine times. She died in Lviv on 4 April 2021, and in 2022 Kovel named a street after the girl it had sent to art school.

Andrii Trokhymovych Kovalchuk was born on 28 April 1974 in the village of Shchytyn in Volyn Oblast and went to the mechanical engineering school at Kovel, where by his own account he had trouble with discipline and escaped expulsion only because his marks were good. He wanted a commission instead, entered the Kyiv Institute of Ground Forces in 1993, transferred in 1994 to the tank command school at Kharkiv and graduated with honours in 1997, and later served with the UN in Kosovo, Liberia and Cote d'Ivoire.

In 2014 he was chief of staff of the 80th Air Assault Brigade when it liberated Lyman, Mykolaivka and Sloviansk, then led part of it into Luhansk Oblast and pushed the rebels out of Luhansk International Airport. Shot in the back and shoulder on 13 July, he refused hospitalisation and held a perimeter of thirteen kilometres there until 31 August. He was one of the instigators of the uniform reform of 24 August 2016, which took the blue beret shared with the Soviet and Russian armies off Ukraine's airborne troops and gave them a red one; Petro Poroshenko made him a Hero of Ukraine that August, and in April 2024 he was appointed head of the Odesa Military Academy.

Andrey Kovalchuk, born in Moscow on 7 September 1959, grew up in the trade: his father, the architect Nikolai Adamovich Kovalchuk, worked for years with the sculptor Lev Kerbel. He graduated from the Moscow Higher School of Industrial Arts in 1981 and works mainly in bronze. To the Victims of Chernobyl, in 1993, was among the earliest memorials in Russia to the dead of the disaster that poisoned the far end of Polissia.

The name travelled the way the region's people did. Ukraine has the footballers Petro and Kyrylo Kovalchuk and the Paralympic shooter Olga Kovalchuk; North America took it as Kowalchuk, and the Canadian politicians John Russell Kowalchuk and Ed Kowalchuk carried it into public life there. One thing did not cross intact. In the East Slavic languages the name is said ko-vahl-CHOOK, the weight at the end where the suffix sits; among Ukrainian Canadians it is ko-WAL-chuk, the stress dragged forward onto the smith.