Odesa Oblast

The length of coastline (sea-coast and estuaries) reaches 300 km (190 mi), while the state border stretches for 1,200 km (750 mi). The region has eight seaports and five of the biggest lakes, including Yalpuh Lake, in Ukraine. With over 80,000 ha (200,000 acres) of vineyards, it is also the largest wine-growing region in Ukraine.

History

Evidence of the earliest inhabitants in this area comes from the settlements and burial grounds of the Neolithic Gumelnița, Cucuteni-Trypillia and Usatove cultures, as well as from the tumuli and hoards of the Bronze Age Proto-Indo-Europeans. In the 1st millennium B.C. Milesian Greeks founded colonies along the northern coast of the Black Sea, including the towns of Tyras and Niconium in the modern Odesa Oblast. The Greeks left behind painted vessels, ceramics, sculptures, inscriptions, arts and crafts that indicate the prosperity of their ancient civilisation.

The culture of Scythian tribes inhabiting the Black Sea littoral steppes in the first millennium B.C. has left artefacts in settlements and burial grounds, including weapons, bronze cauldrons, other utensils, and adornments. By the beginning of the 1st millennium A.D. the Sarmatians displaced the Scythians. In the 3rd–4th centuries A.D. a tribal alliance, represented by the items of Chernyakhov culture, developed. From the middle of the first millennium the formation of the Slavic people began. In the 9th century the eastern Slavs united into a state with Kyiv as its centre. The Khazars, Polovtsy and Pechenegs were the Slavs' neighbours during different times. Archeological evidence of the period of the 9th–14th centuries survives in materials from the settlements and cities of Kievan Rus': Belgorod, Caffa-Theodosia, and Berezan Island.

The Mongols took over the Black Sea littoral in the 13th century.

From about 1290 parts of the region were territories of the Republic of Genoa, becoming a center of Genoese commercial activity until at least the middle of the 14th century.

The Grand Duchy of Lithuania acquired part of the area at the beginning of the 15th century.

In 1593 the Ottoman Empire set up in the area what became known as its Dnieper Province (Özü Eyalet), unofficially known as the Khanate of Ukraine. The northern outskirts of the current oblast, forming part of Podolia, remained within Lithuania, and then passed to the Kingdom of Poland in 1569, within which they were located in Bracław County in the Bracław Voivodeship in the Lesser Poland Province. Savran, Kodyma and Józefgród were Polish private towns, the two latter founded by the Lubomirski family. The bulk of the territory of the Odesa Oblast passed to Russian control in 1791 in the course of the Russian southern expansion towards the Black Sea at the end of the 18th century, whereas the northern outskirts were annexed by Russia in the Second Partition of Poland in 1793. Russian historiography refers to the annexed area from 1791 as the Ochakov Oblast.

After the February Revolution of 1917 in Russia the area became part of the Ukrainian People's Republic (1917–1918), but soon succumbed first to the Russian Volunteer Army (part of the White movement) and then to the Russian Bolshevik Red Army. By 1920 the Soviet authorities had secured the territory of Odesa Oblast, which became part of the Ukrainian SSR. The oblast was established on 27 February 1932 from five districts: Odesa Okruha, Pervomaisk Okruha, Kirovohrad Okruha, Mykolaiv Okruha, and Kherson Okruha. It was the scene of Soviet genocidal crimes, including the Holodomor of 1932–1933 and Polish Operation of the NKVD of 1937.

In 1937 the Central Executive Committee of the USSR split off the eastern portions of the Odesa Oblast to form the Mykolaiv Oblast.

World War II and the Holocaust

During World War II, the territory of the present-day Odesa Oblast was under the control of Axis powers following the German and Romanian invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Most of the region between the Dniester and Southern Bug rivers was placed under Romanian administration as part of the Transnistria Governorate, with Odesa serving as its capital, while the southern Budjak region, which was part of Bessarabia, was reincorporated into Romania after its initial loss in the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina in 1940. Romanian governance lasted until the Soviet advance into the region in 1944.

The region was a major site of the Holocaust under Romanian rule. Romanian authorities established numerous ghettos, camps and other detention sites for local Jews and for Jews deported from Bessarabia and Bukovina. Ghettos within the wartime modern Odesa Oblast included those at Balta, Berezivka, Bobrik (Bobric), and other settlements, while additional camps and ghettos operated throughout Romanian-controlled Transnistria. Jews imprisoned in these sites were subjected to forced labour, starvation, exposure, disease and executions. Across the Transnistria Governorate, Romanian authorities and auxiliary forces murdered an estimated 280,000 to 380,000 Jews.

In Odesa itself, Romanian and German forces began persecuting the Jewish population immediately after the city's capture on 16 October 1941. Tens of thousands of Jews were murdered in the Odesa massacres of October 1941, including mass shootings and the burning alive of prisoners. Approximately 25,000–30,000 Jews were subsequently forced to march from Odesa to the Bogdanovka camp, where nearly all were murdered.

In January 1942, the Romanian authorities ordered the Jews who remained in Odesa into the Slobidka ghetto, which became an assembly and transit point for deportations. More than 31,000 Jews were deported from the city during January and February 1942, principally to Berezovca County in the northern part of the present-day oblast. Many died from exposure during the deportations, while thousands of others were subsequently murdered in mass shootings carried out by ethnic German Selbstschutz units and other auxiliaries. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that these units murdered approximately 33,500 Jews deported from Odesa in Berezovca County between January and June 1942. By April 1942 only 701 registered Jews remained in Odesa, and the Slobidka ghetto was closed on 10 June. The last deportation train left the city on 23 June 1942.

The Red Army reconquered the region in 1944 and retook Odesa on 10 April. A Soviet registration conducted two months later recorded only 2,640 Jews in the city, compared with approximately 200,000 before the war.

Post-war

Odesa Oblast expanded in 1954 to absorb Izmail Oblast (also known as the Budjak region of Bessarabia), formed in 1940 as a result of the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina (from Romania), when Northern and Southern parts of Bessarabia were given to the Ukrainian SSR. In June 1941, 3,767 people were deported, or on the list of people eligible for deportation, by the Soviet authorities from the Izmail Oblast to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Only 1,136 of those deported from the Izmail oblast were alive in Western Siberia (Tomsk region) in 1951.

During the 1991 referendum, 85.38% of votes in Odesa Oblast favored the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine. A survey conducted in December 2014 by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that 2.3% of the oblast's population supported their region joining Russia, 91.5% did not support the idea, and the rest were undecided or did not respond. A poll reported by Alexei Navalny and conducted in September 2014 found similar results.

On 4–5 July 2022 during international Ukraine Recovery Conference (URC 2022) in Lugano Switzerland pledged to support the rebuilding of Odesa region.

An earthquake occurred in the Odessa region on 11 May 2025.