Nikopol (Ukrainian: Нікополь) is a city in Ukraine, in the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, on the right bank of Dnieper river, about 100 km south-west of Dnipropetrovsk. It has about 128,900 inhabitants (2006 estimate)
The 1911 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica gave the following description of Nikopol: 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.
In 1900, its 21,282 inhabitants were Ukrainians, Jews and Mennonites, who carry on agriculture and shipbuilding. The old sich, or fortified camp of the Zaporozhian 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 Dnipropetrovsk to Kherson, is the point where the "salt-highway" of the Chumaks (Ukrainian 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.
The Encyclopedia Britannica information is, of course, based purely on the official history of the Russian Empire. It inaccurately calls the Ukrainian city in the translated way as it was mentioned in the Russian history.
Until 1775, the times of the Sich sacking, it was called as "Mykytyn Rih", "Mykytyn Pereviz", or simply "Mykytyne". The name rih (Ukrainian for horn) was given due to the fact that the locality was based at the place reminiscing a peninsula as it was surrounded by the Dnieper river. Mykytyne was a town of the Kodak Palanka of the Zaporizhian Sich. Later was renamed into Slovianske and then Nikopol (1781).
Just several miles west outside of the city was buried the Kosh otaman Ivan Sirko.
