Grabianka, Grigorii

Date of birth unknown; died about 1738. Ukrainian chronicler of the cossacks.

In 1729, Grabianka became the administrative head (pol-kovnik) of Gadiach. He served with the cossack troops in the Crimean and Azov campaigns, in the Northern War of 1700–21, and elsewhere. He was an ideologist of the cossack starshinas (elders) and Ukrainian shliakhetstvo (service nobility) and wrote the historical work Events of the Great and, on Account of the Poles, Bloody and Most Remarkable War of Bogdan Khmel’nitskii, Hetman of the Zaporozh’e, Against the Poles, published in Kiev in 1853 under the title Chronicle of Grigorii Grabianka. Grabianka’s sources are to be found in chronicles, diaries, oral legends, and the stories of contemporaries. Grabianka endeavored to give a cohesive history of the Ukraine from the earliest times to 1709. He devoted his attention mainly to the question of the origins of the cossacks and the history of the war of liberation of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian people of 1648–54. His work is one of the main sources of Ukrainian history in the 17th and 18th centuries.