Dobrovillia

It is customary to count Dobrovillia’s history from the seventeenth century — a serious date in itself. Yet finds across the Dobrovillia starostat district suggest it all began much earlier. One of them is the “Hostra Mohyla” kurgan (burial mound) near the village of Verkhnia Samara. Here is how it went: in 1972 an expedition of the Kharkiv branch of the Ukrainian Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments studied the mound near Verkhnia Samara in the Bliznyuky hromada.

It found almost nothing there, for everything was in a sorry state. People say — and we believe them, with every reason to — that at the site of the burials, ruined and battered by looters, remains had not so long ago been found together with grave goods: an iron sword, pieces of horse harness and all manner of things. Even so, the mound’s condition did not prevent the researchers from establishing that this was the grave of more than one person and more than one people: three burials of the Pit Grave (Yamna) culture, one of the Catacomb culture, and one more of the Zrubna (Timber Grave) culture.

And in the garden by one of the manor houses, at the bottom of a pond dug for the landlord’s family, people found a stone baba, later identified as Polovtsian. In 2025 there was an anomalous heatwave — the pond dried up, and the statue stood on its bed while the warm days lasted. But the snowy winter of 2026 and the spring rains hid it from us again. Still, the monument is there — and, they say, not alone: another Polovtsian stone baba, better preserved, was once found nearby.

All this means that people have lived on these hills amid the steppe since time immemorial. The better-known life of Dobrovillia, though, belongs to later times — the one still sung about in songs and popular culture. When this land became the “Wild Fields”, the settlement trampled by the Mongols was reborn under the name Naderzhynove — a stronghold against Tatar raids along the rivers. Later, when many settlers came here fleeing serfdom, the village was named Dobrovillia. So it is called to this day, for people here are governed by good, free will of their own — not by masters’ orders.

As local legends and stories tell us, people in Dobrovillia believed in many things. In otherworldly forces — and in God as well. In 1788 the Pavlohrad spiritual board sent a report to His Grace Amvrosii of Katerynoslav on the state of spiritual life in the village of Volia, then in the possession of the Nadarzhynsky family — a state which, apparently, left much to be desired. For it was here, at the end of the eighteenth century, that the Church of the Holy Spirit was built, becoming the centre of the community’s spiritual life. Pilgrims travelled here, people came for the feasts, children were taught here. The church kept a library of its own, which only grew with time. With their own hands and donations people improved the church, restored it after a fire, reinforced it — cared for it and kept it safe.

Then the Soviets came and destroyed everything: the monument of church architecture was lost in the 1930s. Today we only know that in its architecture our church closely resembled the one in the town of Izium in the Kharkiv region.

And though the church did not survive, the faith did. As everywhere in the Bliznyuky region, people here baptised children in secret and celebrated in secret. There was a priest here who would secretly bake Easter cakes, bless them and hand them out to people. Thus the Christian faith lived on to our days — alongside rituals from time immemorial and tales of dark forces, like two sides of one universe.