Tulchyn was first mentioned in written sources in 1607, under the name
Nestervar. It was a
royal city in the
Bracław Voivodeship in the
Lesser Poland Province of the
Crown of the Kingdom of Poland. In 1609 King
Sigismund III Vasa granted the town to
Walenty Aleksander Kalinowski. Until 1728 Tulchyn was part of the estates of the Polish magnates of the
Kalinowski family (other distinguished members of Tulchyn family were
Adam Kalinowski and
Marcin Kalinowski), and then passed into the hands of
Stanisław Potocki bypassing other Kalinowskis' branch, then in 1734 to
Franciszek Salezy Potocki and his son
Stanisław Szczęsny Potocki, who was the most memorable and infamous member of the Tulchyn branch of the Potocki family. During the
Targowica confederation Tulchyn was the headquarters of the confederates. The 14th Polish Infantry Regiment was formed in Tulchyn in 1785 and garrisoned there. In 1793, the
Russian Empire annexed Tulchyn as part of the
Second Partition of Poland. In the 1820s, Tulchyn was a centre of the movement plotting the
Decembrist revolt against the Tsarist regime of Russia. A local branch of the
Union of Prosperity was located in the city. The Yad Vashem database lists the names of 2,177 Jews who had lived in Tulchyn before World War II who died during the Holocaust; among them, 1,145 died in the
Pechora concentration camp. Outside the town of Tulchyn, there was a peat bog; many Jews who worked there died, though the number is hard to estimate, while other Jews from the county, including from the
Ladyzhyn Quarry, were taken by the Germans beyond the Bug River and executed by them, either immediately, or after they were put to work; more than three thousand, mostly people deported from
Chernivtsi in June 1942, died, overwhelmingly after they were taken away by the Germans. Yad Vashem has a list of 461 Jews who died in Tulchyn itself. Out of these, 199 of the Jews who had lived in the town before the war died in there, in some cases before the arrival of the Romanian administration, according to the Yad Vashem database. The Yad Vashem database lists 226 Jews who had lived before the war in Romania among the dead; 92 of them were originally from Bukovina, 26 were originally from Bessarabia, and 61 were from Dorohoi and the neighboring area. On September 1, 1943, there were at least 2,344 deported Jews who lived in the Tulchyn district/judet according to the Gendarmerie Inspectorate headcount, out of which 495 had been deported from Bessarabia, and 1,849 from Bukovina. The Romanian official governmental figure for all the Jews in the district, Ukrainian as well as deported from Romania, was 3,371 on November 1, 1943. This would suggest that more than 1,000 Jews in the district were Ukrainian Jews in the fall of 1943, but most Ukrainian Jews, as well as most deportees from Romania, in the district died during the Holocaust. The area was liberated by the
Red Army in March 1944. For more information on the Holocaust in
Transnistria, including on the fate of the Jewish deportees from Romania, including Bukovina and Bessarabia, see
History of the Jews in Transnistria. As of 2005, the city had a population of 16,136 people. ==Landmarks==