To this day, the remains of a large fortified settlement from the times of Kievan Rus have been preserved on Luka, which historians identify with the ancient Russian city of Lipetsk. However, historians and local historians have not reached a consensus on the year when the city of Sumy was founded. The founding years could be either 1652 or 1655. But the most likely date is the second option.
There is an assumption that the city was settled by migrants from beyond the Dnieper River in several waves. But it is believed that Sumy was founded by Colonel Gerasim Kondratyev, who came in 1655 to this territory of the Russian state from the town of Stavyshchi of the Bila Tserkva Regiment with a small group of Cossack settlers. On April 26, 1655, they sent a message to Tsar Alexei to found a city on this territory.
The message read as follows: 'We, ruined and impoverished by various Tatars and Poles from the town of Stavyshchi, ordinary Cossacks and ataman Gerasimka Kondratyev, and a total of one hundred people, bow our heads. We came from beyond the Dnieper with children and women, came and settled near Sumy on the Psel River... '
Of course, Moscow allowed the Cossacks to settle, and over the course of two years, starting in 1656, a fortress was built under the leadership of K. Yu. Arsenyev, a Russian voivode. In the oak forest, they built 'Sumyn city,' fortress walls were made of oak logs, and an underground passage to the water was built under the fortress itself; that is, they raised a rampart and dug a deep moat around the fortress.
These defensive structures were supplemented by natural ones: the rivers Sumka, Suma, and Psel surrounded the city on all three sides. Approaches to Sumy from the south were barred by a ditch between the Sumka and the Psel, which was built in 1658. This fortress was also the largest and most fortified fortress of Sloboda Ukraine.
At the same time, Ukrainian peasants who were under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at that time began to move to the southern regions as early as the second half of the 16th century. The entire process of migration of Ukrainian settlers continued until the middle of the 18th century.
The founding of the city of Sumy was influenced by several general historical processes that were taking place simultaneously in Sloboda Ukraine. One reason for the city's emergence was the political situation that occurred in the second half of the 17th century.
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