Balta, Ukraine

Balta (Балта, ; Balta; Bałta; באַלטאַ) is a city in Podilsk Raion, Odesa Oblast in south-western Ukraine. It hosts the administration of Balta urban hromada, one of the hromadas of Ukraine. Population: The city's population was 19,772 as of the 2001 Ukrainian Census.

History
The first mentions of Balta, a town on the right bank of the Kodyma River, go back to 1526. In the 18th century, Polish nobleman Józef Aleksander Lubomirski founded the border town of Józefgród, named after him, on the left bank of the Kodyma, opposite of Ottoman-ruled Balta. In 1768, a Polish unit of the Bar Confederation fled across the border to Ottoman-ruled Balta, followed by chasing Russian troops, who then burned the town, an event that sparked the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774). In 1776, King Stanisław August Poniatowski vested Józefgród with town rights and established two annual fairs. It was a private town of the Lubomirski family, administratively located in the Bracław County in the Bracław Voivodeship in the Lesser Poland Province of the Kingdom of Poland.

Balta and Józefgród were annexed by Russia in 1791 and 1793, respectively. In 1797, Józefgród, by then renamed to Yelensk (Еленськ) and Balta were merged into one town, retaining the name of the latter. It is located in the historic Podolia region. According to the Russian census of 1897, with a population of 23,363 it was the fourth largest city of Podolia after Kamianets-Podilskyi, Uman and Vinnytsia. In 1900, the city's Jewish population numbered 13,235.

Pogroms occurred in Balta in 1882 and 1905.

From 1924–1929, the city was the capital of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. With the annexation of Bessarabia in 1940, Balta became a part of the Odesa Oblast of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It was occupied by German and Romanian troops on 5 August 1941 and became part of Transnistria Governorate in Kingdom of Romania until its recapture on 29 March 1944 by Red Army.

Until 2016, Balta was part of Balta Raion. On 4 February 2016, it was designated the city of oblast significance but remained the administrative center of the raion. It was incorporated as the center of Balta Municipality. The municipality was abolished in July 2020 as part of the administrative reform of Ukraine, which reduced the number of raions of Odesa Oblast to seven. The area of Balta Municipality was merged into Podilsk Raion.

Language
Distribution of the population by native language according to the 2001 census:

Notable people

 * Aryeh Altman, Israeli politician
 * Yuly Aykhenvald, Ukrainian Jewish literary critic
 * Zellig Harris, American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science
 * Vsevolod Holubovych, Prime Minister of the Ukrainian People's Republic
 * Grigori Panteleimonov, Russian sport shooter who competed in the 1912 Summer Olympics
 * Aryeh Leib Schochet, Rabbi
 * Samuel (Sholem) Schwarzbard, (1886–1938), Yiddish poet, watchmaker, soldier, anarchist; grew up in Balta
 * Louis E. Stern (b. 08/27/1886 d. 01/11/1962), American International Lawyer, patron and friend of Chagall, Picasso, Klee and Miro, collection left to Philadelphia Museum of Art and Brooklyn Museum
 * Judah Even Shemuel
 * Iosif Shkolnik, was a painter and set designer
 * Alexander Veprik, composer and music educator