Systematization of the views of researchers and scholars regarding the geographical location of the ancient Russian town of Horobor

Abstract

The article analyzes one of the most complex problems of the medieval historical geography of Left-Bank Ukraine — the issue of territorial attribution and chronological fixation of the chronicle city of Khorobor.

Based on the processing of a significant body of sources and scientific literature of the 19th – early 21st centuries, the authors reveal the evolution of views on this "terra incognita" of the Chernihiv-Sivershchyna region, which, due to the lack of an authentic cartographic base, remained an object of hypothetical assumptions for a long time.

The study is based on a critical rethinking of the work of representatives of various scientific schools. The authors propose their own classification of researchers ("khoroborologists"), dividing them by the level of argumentation and methodological approaches into concretists-conceptualists, sympathizers-solidarists, and skeptics-pessimists. The arguments in favor of the four main location centers of this chronicle city are examined in detail: the urban-type settlement of Korop, the urban-type settlement of Makoshyne, the village of Khorobychi, and the town of Mena.

Special attention is paid to the methodological dissonance between the data of written sources, toponymic parallels, and the results of archaeological surveys (by M. Voyevodskyi, I. Yedomakha, V. Kovalenko, and others). The authors prove that the canonization of the "Makoshyne version" in the Soviet and modern encyclopedic tradition is largely a product of an administrative-typological compromise rather than a final scientific verdict. The work emphasizes the importance of Yu. Vynogradskyi’s linguistic method and S. Pavlenko’s microtoponymic studies, which indicate a much wider geography of the distribution of "Khorobor" names.

In the conclusions, the authors substantiate the "wandering concept" of Khorobor. It is hypothesized that as a result of the Mongol invasion and inter-princely wars of the 12th – 13th centuries, the city could have changed its location several times, which explains the etymological presence of the toponym in different districts of the Chernihiv region and even in Western Ukraine. It is stated that given the current state of archaeological study of the region, the question of the primary location of Khorobor remains open, requiring the involvement of the latest remote sensing methods and interdisciplinary synthesis.