Kremenets

a city, the administrative center of Kremenets Raion, Ternopol’ Oblast, Ukrainian SSR. A highway junction and the terminus of a railroad branch off the Zdolbunov-L’vov line. Population, 20,300 (1972). It has sugar and tobacco-fermenting plants, a brewery, a furniture shop, and a wadding factory. Building materials are produced in Kremenets, and there are technicums of forestry and of agriculture, a medical school, and a teachers college, as well as a museum of local lore.

Kremenets is mentioned for the first time in the chronicles for 1226 as a town of the Galician-Volynian Principality; in 1240 1255 it withstood Tatar sieges. From the second half of the 14th century it was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In 1569 it passed under the control of Poland. In 1630, in the town’s printing house, books were printed in the Slavonic language. In 1648 the town was taken by the cossacks. According to the terms of the Armistice of Andrusovo of 1667, it was returned to Polish control. By the second partition of Poland (1793), it became part of Russia, becoming in 1797 a chief district town of Volyn’ Province. By the Peace Treaty of Riga of 1921, it was transferred to bourgeois Poland. After the reuniting of the Western Ukraine with the Ukrainian SSR (1939), it became a raion center of Ternopol’ Oblast. During the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945, it was occupied from July 22, 1941, to Mar. 18, 1944, by the fascist German troops, who inflicted massive damage on it. In the postwar years the city has been fully rebuilt.