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Bakhmut

Bakhmut is a city in the eastern Ukrainian lands (Southern Slobozhanshchyna / Donetsk region), one of the most important historical centers of salt-making and salt extraction in Ukraine.

Overview

Bakhmut arose in the 17th century thanks to a settlement of Ukrainian Cossacks and chumaks ("Cherkasy"), who launched salt-boiling from local salt lakes and underground brine springs. Salt became the region's first strategic resource ("white gold"). The Bakhmut salt industry created powerful economic competition for the Crimean salt lakes and became a catalyst for the discovery of coal deposits in the Donbas.

Key Details / Subtopics

  • Founding and the first salt works: Ukrainians began resettling on the banks of the Bakhmut and Siverskyi Donets rivers from the 17th century. Alongside the town of Tor (present-day Sloviansk), Bakhmut became the main center of salt-making.
  • Salt Wars (1697–1701): Control over the salt deposits provoked acute armed conflicts. In 1697 the Crimean Tatars raided Tor, destroying the salt works. In 1701 a confrontation took place between the Cossacks of the Izium regiment (led by Colonel Shydlovsky) and the Don Cossacks over control of the Bakhmut salt works, in which the Sloboda Cossacks prevailed.
  • Salt-boiling technology: Brine was drawn by horse power from 60–90-meter wells ("windows"), poured into a reservoir (tvorylo), from there through a vat along troughs fed onto wooden towers and distributed across large frying pans (5–40 m²), beneath which fire was burned. The tax was 6 rubles per day per frying pan.
  • Origins of the coal industry: To boil salt, salt-makers felled the surrounding forests on a mass scale, which stimulated the search for new types of fuel and the discovery of hard-coal deposits on the banks of the Siverskyi Donets.
  • Economic indicators: In the 1760s Bakhmut and Tor supplied 330,000 poods (5,250 tonnes) of salt annually (while Crimea produced ~200,000 poods). In the 19th century two-thirds of all Ukrainian salt was extracted in the Donetsk region. In the 1880s shaft mining of rock salt (halite) in the Bakhmut region won the competition against Crimean lake salt.