The original name of Donetsk

England's first three matches at Euro 2012 were in Donetsk, a large industrial city in eastern Ukraine. Donetsk has undergone several name changes in its history. Its original name in tsarist times was Yuzovka, Yuz being a Russian or Ukrainian transliteration of the surname Hughes. It was named after John Hughes, a Welsh engineer born in Merthyr Tydfil in 1814. He started his career at Merthyr ironworks and became wealthy over the years. In his mid-fifties he was asked by the tsarist government to build metalworks in what is now Ukraine. Hughes formed a company - the New Russia Company - and decamped to the then Russian empire with his wife and eight children, and about a hundred ironworkers and miners from south Wales. Hughes built factories and ironworks, and also built a railway line leading to them. He built a settlement to house the workers, and within it built schools, a hospital, an Anglican church and other facilities, and it is this settlement that was named (by him) Hughesovka, or Yuzovka. John Hughes died in St Petersburg in 1889. His sons and most of his workers returned to Britain after the 1917 Revolution. Yuzovka was renamed Stalino in 1924, and then Donetsk in 1961, after Stalin had fallen out of favour.

 

John Hughes was not the only Briton - nor indeed the first - to found a town in Ukraine. Charles Gascoigne, a British engineer founded the city of Luhansk (or Lugansk), not far from Donetsk, in 1795, when he built an iron foundry there.

Comments

[John]

One wonders what "England expects" now. They're doing very well.

Re "Donetsk", it the correct pronunciation as spelt or is it more like "DonYetsk"? I've heard both in the Euro 2012 coverage.

Thanks....good post.

[Virtual Linguist]

Thanks, John. The Russian pronunciation of the city (and although Donetsk is in Ukraine, it has a lot of ethnic Russian residents and probably Russian-speaking Ukrainian residents) is Dan-yetsk, with the stress on the second syllable. The Russian letter E, when stressed, is pronounced Ye... E is the first letter of the names Yeltsin, Yerevan and Yevgenii. When O comes before the stressed syllable it is pronounced like a weak A sound.

[chaussures shox]

Realmente me encantó este post. Un buen blog siempre viene-con la información nueva y emocionante. La mayoría de la información aquí era bastante esclarecedor!

[jdkeith Palmer]

Dr JDKeith Palmer of Virginia 2013. I was 17 when introduced to Mrs Hughes, aged 85, She was living in Uplands, Swansea when I met her. in 1940 to teach me some Russian language and experiences. She was the widow of John Hughes of Yuzovka.,. She described her life as a young second wife of John Hughes emigrating from Swansea to the Ukraine in the early 1800s to live in the city named after her new husband. The Russian she taught me causes smiles when I use it to modern Russians, as it is a century out of date, rather like a person now speaking in Victorian English.

[Virtual Linguist]

That's fascinating, Dr Palmer. Thanks so much for writing this and sharing the story. You must have heard a lot of interesting stories from her.