The fortress of Izmail, then known as , was built by
Genoese merchants in the 12th century. It belonged for a short period of time to
Wallachia (14th century) – as the territory north of the Danube was one of the possessions of the
Basarabs (later the land being named after them,
Bessarabia). The town was first mentioned with the name
Ismailiye, derived from the name of the
Ottoman grand vizier Ayaşlı Ismail Pasha. The city was founded by a decree of Sultan
Murad III, with a deed where he made the land around the crossing point, property of
Habeshi Mehmed Agha which was the head of his harem. The city that Mehmed Agha founded was called after him
Mehmedabad and in its significance it was even compared to
Baghdad - although the scale, of course, is not the same. From the end of the 14th century, Izmail was under the rule of
Moldavia. In 1484, the Ottoman state conquered the territory, which became from that moment an Ottoman protectorate (under direct rule from 1538). Since the early 16th century it was the main Ottoman fortress in the
Budjak region. In 1569
Sultan Selim II settled Izmail with his
Nogai subjects, originally from the
North Caucasus. After
Russian general
Nicholas Repnin took the fortress of Izmail in 1770, it was heavily refortified by the Turks, so as never to be captured again. The Sultan boasted that the fortress was impregnable, but during the
Russo-Turkish War of 1787–1792 the
Russian Army commander
Alexander Suvorov successfully stormed it on 22 December 1790. Ottoman forces inside the fortress had the orders to stand their ground to the end, haughtily declining the Russian
ultimatum. The defeat was seen as a catastrophe in the Ottoman Empire, while in Russia it was glorified in the country's first
national anthem,
Let the thunder of victory sound!. Suvorov "announced the capture of Ismail in 1791 to the
Tsarina Catherine in a
doggerel couplet, after the assault had been pressed from house to house, room to room, and nearly every Muslim man, woman and child in the city had been killed in three days of uncontrolled massacre, 40,000 Turks dead, a few hundred taken into captivity. For all his bluffness, Suvorov later told an
English traveler that when the massacre was over he went back to his tent and wept." At the end of the war, Izmail was returned to the Ottoman Empire, but Russian forces took it for the third time on 14 September 1809. After it was ceded to Russia with the rest of
Bessarabia by the 1812
Treaty of Bucharest, the town was rebuilt thoroughly. The Intercession Cathedral (1822–36), the churches of Nativity (1823),
St. Nicholas (1833) and several others date back to that time. Izmail's oldest building is the
small Turkish mosque, erected either in the 15th or 16th centuries, converted into a church in 1810 and currently housing a museum dedicated to the 1790 storm of Izmail. After Russia lost the
Crimean War, the town returned to the
Principality of Moldavia, which would soon become part of the
Romanian Principalities. Russia gained control of Izmail again after the
Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. With the breakup of the
Russian Empire in 1917 and in the aftermath of
World War I, the city was occupied by the
Romanian Army on 22 January 1918, after a skirmish with troops of the Danube flotilla. Later that year, the
Sfatul Țării of
Chișinău, which claimed to be the representative of the whole of
Bessarabia, voted to formally
unite the region with Romania. This union was recognized by the United Kingdom, France and Italy in the
Treaty of Paris, but not by the
Soviet Union which had territorial claims over Bessarabia. In 1940, and again during
World War II, it was occupied by the Soviet
Red Army and included (August 1940, as a result of
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact ) in the
Ukrainian SSR; the region was occupied in 1941 by the
Romanian Army participating in
Operation Barbarossa. The 678 Jews recorded in the September 1, 1941 Romanian census were deported to Transnistria by the Romanian authorities in 1941, where a large majority of them died. During the
Soviet period following
World War II, many
Russians and
Ukrainians migrated to the town, gradually changing its ethnic composition.
Izmail Oblast was formed in 1940 and the town remained its administrative center until the oblast was merged to
Odesa Oblast in 1954. Since 24 August 1991, Izmail has been part of independent
Ukraine. Until 18 July 2020, Izmail was incorporated as a
city of oblast significance and served as the administrative center of Izmail Raion though it did not belong to the raion. In July 2020, as part of the administrative reform of Ukraine, which reduced the number of raions of Odesa Oblast to seven, the city of Izmail was merged into Izmail Raion. Following the full-scale
Russian invasion of Ukraine, the monument to Alexander Suvorov in Izmail's city centre was placed in temporary storage on 12 November 2022, until city deputies decide where it will be kept permanently. On 27 September 2024, Izmail suffered a Russian missile and drone attack. == Geography ==