Soroka: a crown village by 1548, not the farmstead of a Cossack settler

The entry, as printed

Paulo Przezwoczki, tribuno Camenecensi, una cum filiis Ioanne, Floriano, Friderico, Stanislao, Blasio et Iacobo, super villas Klunicze et Soroki districtus Trebowliensis advitalitas data est. … Eidem Paulo Przezwoczki datus est consensus redimendi sortes in bonis regalibus Klunicze et Soroka de manibus Martini Siekierzynski, Dorotheae sororis ipsius germanae, et Stanislai Wolski.

In English

To Paweł Przewocki, court officer of Kamianets, together with his sons Jan, Florian, Fryderyk, Stanisław, Błażej and Jakub, life tenure of the villages of Klunicze and Soroki in Terebovlia district has been given. … To the same Paweł Przewocki consent has been given to redeem the shares in the royal estates of Klunicze and Soroka from the hands of Marcin Siekierzyński, his own sister Dorota, and Stanisław Wolski.

A legend and a date

Of Soroka near Khorostkiv, Wikipedia says the first mentions of the village “begin somewhere at the start of the seventeenth century”, and its infobox gives 1659. It also retells a legend: the village was founded by a Cossack named Soroka.

The royal registers tell a different story, and a century earlier.

Two entries on one day, 1548

On 23 January 1548 in Piotrków the royal chancery entered two records in the Crown Register about one man, Paweł Przewocki, a court officer of Kamianets. In the first, the king gave him and his six sons life tenure of “the villages of Klunicze and Soroki in Terebovlia district”.

In the second, Przewocki received consent to redeem the shares in “the royal estates of Klunicze and Soroka” from the hands of Marcin Siekierzyński, his sister Dorota and Stanisław Wolski.

What this says about the village

In 1548 Soroka is not one settler’s farmstead but a crown village, owned by the Crown. The king pledged such villages to noblemen who lent money to the treasury, and until the debt was repaid they took the village’s income. Soroka was divided into shares, and those shares were already held by three different people.

So by 1548 the village already had a history. The record does not say when it began, but certainly earlier.

How we know it is our Soroka

The district is named outright: Terebovlia, to which neighbouring Khorostkiv also belonged. The other Sorokas of the region lay in Halych district, near Buchach, and Sorotske near Skalat was spelled differently, “Soroczko”. The Geographical Dictionary places Soroka 4.5 km from Khorostkiv.

The other village of the pair, “Klunicze”, is most likely neighbouring Kliuvyntsi, four or five kilometres away. The same dictionary has a cross-reference: “Kłunice, also Kluwina, see Kluwińce”. If so, Kliuvyntsi too is mentioned twenty years earlier than the reference books say (1568).

And the Cossack Soroka?

A legend may keep the memory of a real person once known by that name. But it does not explain the village’s beginning: in 1548 Soroka was already a crown village with its own pledge-holders.

Neither Soroka nor Kliuvyntsi appears in the 1564 tax register. The documents do not say why. Perhaps the answer is known in Soroka itself.

Sources

• Matricularum Regni Poloniae summaria, part IV, vol. 2 (Warsaw, 1915), p. 466, nos. 8143 and 8145 (Piotrków, 23.01.1548; Crown Register, book 74a, fol. 329).
• Słownik geograficzny Królestwa Polskiego, vol. XI (Warsaw, 1890), entry “Soroka”; vol. IV (Warsaw, 1883), pp. 171 and 190, entries “Kluwińce” and “Kłunice”.
• A. Jabłonowski, Źródła dziejowe, vol. XVIII, part 1 (Warsaw, 1902), pp. 87 and 96 (namesakes: Soroki near Buchach, Sorotske).

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