Taras Fedorovych

Taras Fedorovych (pseudonym, Taras Triasylo, Hassan Tarasa, Assan Trasso) (, ) (died after 1636) was a prominent leader of the Dnieper Cossacks, a popular Hetman (Cossack leader) elected by unregistered Cossacks.

Between 1629 and 1636, Fedorovych played a key role in the regional conflicts involving the rebellion of the Ruthenian (Ukrainian) Cossacks and peasants against the Polish rule over the Dnieper Ukraine territory as well as in the conflicts that included the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Tsardom of Russia and the Ukrainians torn between those two neighbors.

With many circumstances of his life remaining mysterious to this day, Fedorovych is a revered figure in both Ukrainian folklore and in the Ukrainian national idea, a hero of poems by Taras Shevchenko, a personage of the earliest Ukrainian motion picture and one of only four Cossack leaders explicitly mentioned in the Pavlo Chubynsky poem that later became the basis of the modern National Anthem of Ukraine.Cimmerians

Early life Taras Fedorovych was born to a Tatar family in Crimea, his given name was Hassan. It is unclear when he converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity and joined the Zaporozhian Cossacks Host. He is initially documented by references in the 1620s to his position as the Cossack Polkovnyk (Colonel) Hassan Tarasa in Hungarian chronicles, noted for considerable cruelty during his participation in the Thirty Years War as a Habsburg mercenary. In 1629, after the pro-Polish Cossack Hetman Mykhailo Doroshenko was killed in Crimea, the unregistered Cossacks elected Fedorovych to the Hetmanship and, under his leadership, participated in the subsequent Crimean campaign. The ranks of Cossacks who joined the resistance reached forty thousand.

The Cossack uprising fell on the fertile ground of the overall condition of Ukrainian peasantry who under Polish control were subject to continued enserfment and exploitation by mostly Polish or polonized szlachta (nobility). Particularly resented was the attempt to impose Roman Catholicism on the unwilling Ukrainians, who had been traditionally Eastern Orthodox.

About ten thousand rebels proceeded from the Zaporizhian Sich towards the upper Dnieper territories, overrunning the Polish forces stationed there. The rebels captured and executed the Hetman of the registered Cossacks Hryhoriy Chorny for his pro-Polish stance and support of the Union of Brest, and subsequently came to an agreement on a new leadership by nominating Fedorovych for the position of Hetman. It recounted the then nearly three-hundred-year-old events through the silent-movie prism of the Soviet film industry.

Taras Tryasila Street exists in Kyiv