Great Meadow, Ukraine

The Great Meadow (Ukrainian: Великий луг, romanized: Velykyi luh) was a Black Sea lowland area on the Dnieper and the Konka Rivers to the south of Khortytsia Island that consisted of a system of rivers, reed beds, swamps, flooded forests, and meadows. The Great Meadow landscape embodies the concept of Motherland for Ukrainians. Surrounded by the Pontic–Caspian steppe, it was around 20 kilometres (12 mi) wide and 100 kilometres (62 mi) long.

The Great Meadow has been inhabited since the Bronze Age. The Scythians, who flourished during the 4th century BC, were followed by the nomadic tribes of the Sarmatians, Iazyges, Roxolani, and Yamnaya. In 16th–18th centuries, it was inhabited by the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who were protected from external threats by the dense forests and intricate waterways. Six of their eight Sichs were located on its northern border.

After the Zaporizhzhian Sich was destroyed in 1775 by the order of Catherine the Great, the Great Meadow was divided up between her closest nobles, and became fully integrated into the Russian Empire. From that period until the end of the First World War, farmers and landowners extracted as much profit as possible from the area. From the 1920s much of the Great Meadow became collective farmland; only 20% of the area remained as forest by the 1950s. The creation of the Kakhovka Reservoir in 1956 caused irreversible damage to what remained of the original landscape. The reservoir was destroyed in June 2023 during the Russo-Ukrainian War, after which tributaries of the Dnieper, islands, and Cossack tracks reappeared. Hydrologists and engineers support the future reconstruction of the reservoir, but ecologists, historians, and archaeologists do not.

The original Great Meadow was the most prominent natural forest in the steppes of Ukraine. It was an important feeding area for migrating birds, and was inhabited by wild pigs, martens, and wolves. The creation of the reservoir in the 1950s led to the local loss or near-extinction of plants, and fundamentally changed the hydrology of the lower Dnieper. Since the destruction of the dam, a vast new ecosystem—similar to the original landscape of alternating strips of woodland with meadows and swamps—has appeared, a phenomenon that provides an opportunity for the development of forest ecosystems in river valleys to be studied in depth.