Confluence of the rivers Southern Bug and Dnieper

The Southern Bug, also called Southern Buh (; ; ; or just ), and sometimes Boh River (; ),
at the

Encyclopedia of Ukraine The ''Encyclopedia of Ukraine'' (), published from 1984 to 2001, is a fundamental work of Ukrainian Studies. Development The work was created under the auspices of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Europe (Sarcelles, near Paris). As the ...

is a navigable river located in

Ukraine Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the List of European countries by area, second-largest country in Europe after Russia, which Russia–Ukraine border, borders it to the east and northeast. Ukraine also borders Belarus to the nor ...

. It is the second-longest river flowing exclusively in Ukraine. While located in relatively close proximity, the river should not be confused with

Western Bug The Bug or Western Bug is a major river in Central Europe that flows through Belarus (border), Poland, and Ukraine, with a total length of .Baltics The Baltic states or the Baltic countries is a geopolitical term encompassing Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. All three countries are members of NATO, the European Union, the Eurozone, and the OECD. The three sovereign states on the eastern co ...

. The source of the Southern Bug is in the west of Ukraine, in the

Volhynian-Podolian Upland The Volhynian-Podolian Upland () is a system of uplands in West Ukraine and Right-bank Ukraine, right-bank Ukraine. The upland includes: * Podillia Upland **Opillia Upland **Lviv Plateau **Holohory-Kremenets Ridge ***Kremenets Hills ***Holohory ...

, about from the Polish border, from where it flows southeasterly into the

Bug Estuary The Bug estuary () is an estuary of the Southern Bug. It is long and up to wide. Together with the Dnieper estuary it makes the Dnieper–Bug estuary on the northern coast of the Black Sea. The city of Mykolaiv is located on the Bug estuary. Dni ...

(

Black Sea The Black Sea is a marginal sea, marginal Mediterranean sea (oceanography), mediterranean sea lying between Europe and Asia, east of the Balkans, south of the East European Plain, west of the Caucasus, and north of Anatolia. It is bound ...

basin) through the southern

steppes In physical geography, a steppe () is an ecoregion characterized by grassland plains without closed forests except near rivers and lakes. Steppe biomes may include: * the montane grasslands and shrublands biome * the tropical and subtropical gr ...

(see Granite-steppe lands of Buh park). It is long and drains .Южный Буг

Great Soviet Encyclopedia The ''Great Soviet Encyclopedia'' (GSE; , ''BSE'') is one of the largest Russian-language encyclopedias, published in the Soviet Union from 1926 to 1990. After 2002, the encyclopedia's data was partially included into the later ''Great Russian Enc ...

Several regionally important cities and towns in Ukraine are located on the Southern Bug. Beginning in Western Ukraine and moving downstream, in a southeasterly direction, they are: Khmelnytskyi,

Khmilnyk Khmilnyk (, ; ; ) is a resort town, resort city in Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine. It serves as the administrative center of Khmilnyk Raion within the oblast. Population: The town is situated in the upper part of the Southern Bug River, northeast o ...

Vinnytsia Vinnytsia ( ; , ) is a city in west-central Ukraine, located on the banks of the Southern Bug. It serves as the administrative centre, administrative center of Vinnytsia Oblast. It is the largest city in the historic region of Podillia. It also s ...

Haivoron Haivoron (, ) is a city in Holovanivsk Raion, Kirovohrad Oblast, Ukraine. It hosts the administration of the Haivoron urban hromada, Haivoron Urban Hromada, one of the hromadas of Ukraine. Haivoron is situated along the Southern Bug.Гайвор ...

, Pervomaisk, Voznesensk and

Mykolaiv Mykolaiv ( ), also known as Nikolaev ( ) is a List of cities in Ukraine, city and a hromada (municipality) in southern Ukraine. Mykolaiv is the Administrative centre, administrative center of Mykolaiv Raion (Raions of Ukraine, district) and Myk ...

. On several occasions the river served as an international border. At least following the 1768–1774 Russo-Turkish War, and more narrowly the Chyhyryn campaigns, the river became a border between the Imperial Russia and Ottomans. Some 200 years later between 1941 and 1944 during

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

the Southern Bug formed the border between German-occupied Ukraine (

Reichskommissariat Ukraine The ''Reichskommissariat Ukraine'' (RKU; ) was an administrative entity of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories of Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1944. It served as the German civilian occupation regime in the Ukrainian SSR, and ...

) and the Romanian-occupied part of Ukraine, called

Transnistria Transnistria, officially known as the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic and locally as Pridnestrovie, is a Landlocked country, landlocked Transnistria conflict#International recognition of Transnistria, breakaway state internationally recogn ...

Nomenclature and etymology

Herodotus Herodotus (; BC) was a Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus (now Bodrum, Turkey), under Persian control in the 5th century BC, and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria, Italy. He wrote the '' Histori ...

(c. 484–425 BCE) refers to the river using its

ancient Greek Ancient Greek (, ; ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the classical antiquity, ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Greek ...

name: Hypanis. During the

Migration Period The Migration Period ( 300 to 600 AD), also known as the Barbarian Invasions, was a period in European history marked by large-scale migrations that saw the fall of the Western Roman Empire and subsequent settlement of its former territories ...

of the 5th to the 8th centuries CE the Southern Bug represented a major obstacle to all the migrating peoples in the area. In his work

Getica ''De origine actibusque Getarum'' (''The Origin and Deeds of the Getae''), commonly abbreviated ''Getica'' (), written in Late Latin by Jordanes in or shortly after 551 AD, claims to be a summary of a voluminous account by Cassiodorus of the ori ...

Jordanes Jordanes (; Greek language, Greek: Ιορδάνης), also written as Jordanis or Jornandes, was a 6th-century Eastern Roman bureaucrat, claimed to be of Goths, Gothic descent, who became a historian later in life. He wrote two works, one on R ...

calls the river Bogossola.Southern Bug (Южный Буг)
www.tourclub.com.ua. Mentioning of Bogossola could also be found in works of Guido of Pisa. The long-standing local Slavic name of the river, ''Boh'' (

Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...

: Бог), according to Zbigniew Gołąb as ''*bugъ''/''*buga'' derives from Indo-European verbal root ''*bheug-'' (having cognates in old Germanic word ''*bheugh-'' etc. with meaning of "bend, turn, moves away"), with hypothetical original meaning of "pertaining to a (river) bend", and derivatives in Russian ''búga'' ("low banks of a river, overgrown with bushes"), Polish ''bugaj'' ("bushes or woods in a river valley or on a steep river bank"), Latvian ''bauga'' ("marshy place by a river"). The Polish linguist Jan Michał Rozwadowski was explaining that the name derived from the Indo-European root "water", "source", "swamp". The 17th-century French military engineer and geographer

Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan Guillaume Levasseur de Beauplan ( – 6 December 1673) or William le Vasseur de Beauplan was a French-Polish cartographer, engineer and architect. Beauplan is best known for his maps of Ukraine (which he spelt as ''Ukranie'' or ''Vkranie'', wi ...

recorded the name of the river as ''Bog''.

History

From the 16th to the 18th centuries most of the south of Ukraine was under Turkish imperial domination and the colonists renamed the river using their language to the ''Aq-su'', meaning the "White river". Indigenous Slavic toponyms were re-established after the conquest of the Pontic region from Turkish domination in the 17th and 18th centuries. On March 6, 1918, the Central Council of the

Ukrainian People's Republic The Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR) was a short-lived state in Eastern Europe. Prior to its proclamation, the Central Council of Ukraine was elected in March 1917 Ukraine after the Russian Revolution, as a result of the February Revolution, ...

adopted a law on the "administrative-territorial division of Ukraine", dividing it into regional districts. One of these, Pobozhia (meaning lands of the ''Boh'', ), was in the upstream lands of the Southern Bug, near the source of the river.

Tributaries

The main tributaries of the Southern Bug are, from source to mouth (length in parentheses): * Left: Buzhok (75), Ikva (57), Snyvoda (58), Desna (80), Sob (115), Udych (56), Synytsia (78), Synyukha (111), Velyka Korabelna (45), Mertvovid (114), Hnylyi Yelanets (103), Inhul (354) * Right: Vovk (71), Zghar (95), Riv (104), Silnytsia (67), Dokhna (68), Savran (97), Kodyma (149), Bakshala (57), Chychyklia (156)

Ecology

In October 2020, the Southern Bug was stocked with three hundred and fifty kilograms of Hungarian carp and 50 kilograms of silver carp at Khmelnytskyi.

Bridges and ferries

The Varvarivskyi Bridge over Southern Bug in

is a

swing bridge A swing bridge (or swing span bridge) is a movable bridge that can be rotated horizontally around a vertical axis. It has as its primary structural support a vertical locating pin and support ring, usually at or near to its center of gravit ...

(facilitating

ship building Shipbuilding is the construction of ships and other floating vessels. In modern times, it normally takes place in a specialized facility known as a shipyard. Shipbuilders, also called shipwrights, follow a specialized occupation that traces i ...

) with

Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

's largest span (134 m). It is also the southernmost bridge over the river.

Navigation

The river is technically navigable for dozens of kilometers up from its mouth; several river ports (such as

) exist. In 2011, plans were announced to revive commercial freight navigation on the Southern Bug upstream of Mykolaiv, to facilitate the increasing

grain A grain is a small, hard, dry fruit (caryopsis) – with or without an attached husk, hull layer – harvested for human or animal consumption. A grain crop is a grain-producing plant. The two main types of commercial grain crops are cereals and ...

export from Ukraine.«НИБУЛОН» заложил основу собственного флота
/ref> As of April 2018, freight navigation was renewed between the estuary and a newly built grain terminal in the village of Prybuzhany, Voznesensk Raion, in the center of the

Mykolaiv Oblast Mykolaiv Oblast (, ), also referred to as Mykolaivshchyna (, ), is an administrative divisions of Ukraine, oblast (province) of Ukraine. The administrative center of the oblast is the city of Mykolaiv. At the most recent estimate, the population ...

Gallery

File:Southern Bug under ice.JPG, Winter-frozen Southern Bug in

. File:Rika Ploska vpadaye v Pivdenny Bug, Khmelnitsky, 2005 07 28.jpg, The emptying into the Southern Bug. File:South Bug Vinnitsa 2006 G1.JPG, Southern Bug in

. File:Ship M I Pirogov Vinnitsa 2006 G2.jpg, A

riverboat A riverboat is a watercraft designed for inland navigation on lakes, rivers, and artificial waterways. They are generally equipped and outfitted as work boats in one of the carrying trades, for freight or people transport, including luxury ...

on the river in Vinnytsia (2006). File:South bug08.jpg, Riverside skyline of Khmelnytskyi. File:Yujni bug 2.jpg, Southern Bug in vicinity of the Granite-steppe lands of Bug landscape park. File:Меджибізький замок (травень 2011).jpg, Southern Bug in Medzhybizh File:Confluence of the rivers Southern Bug and Dnieper.jpg, Historical map of the confluence of the rivers Southern Bug and Dnieper.

References

External links

Southern Buh rafting
*
Boh
in the

Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland The Geographical Dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland and other Slavic Countries () is a monumental Polish gazetteer, published 1880–1902 in Warsaw Warsaw, officially the Capital City of Warsaw, is the capital and List of cities and towns ...

(1880) *
Photos of the Southern Buh coasts
*

{{Authority control Rivers of Ukraine Rivers of Khmelnytskyi Oblast Rivers of Kirovohrad Oblast Rivers of Mykolaiv Oblast Rivers of Odesa Oblast Rivers of Vinnytsia Oblast Tributaries of the Black Sea