The article describes 'Zlotopol' or 'Hulajpol', a town in Ukraine at the time, which once belonged to the estate of Prince Ksawery Lubomirski. The latter was to eventually sell it to Prince Potemkin. The text mentions the general outline of the town and the church, where Father Jaworowski is the parish priest. (Source: Tygodnik Illustrowany, Warsaw 1862, T:5, p. 140., after: Digital Library of the University of Łódź).

A modernised reading of the text

Złotopól

On the very edge of the former Polish border separating it from New Russia, or the Kherson steppe, lies the town of Złotopól on the Turiya river. There was a Polish outpost here, and even at the end of the last century it was called Hnlaj-Polska. People still call Zlatopol "Hulajpolce". The Vyše river divides it from another town, situated on the opposite bank and called Mirhorod. Why was this small town called Hulajpol and Zlatopol? A look at the surroundings surrounding it is enough to explain the reason.

It is here that the unbridled steppes, stretching all the way to the Black Sea, begin, and it is here that the traveller sees, for the last time in the borderland of old Poland, clumps of forest, like bush-horns or reed islands sitting on vast areas of field. The surroundings already have a steppe-like expression, but strangely cheerful, wide, reaching for miles, fringed with rows of barrows and graves and covered with a vast blue sheet of sky. Cheerful here, hulking in the face of this plane dying away in the distance. You can feel the desert, its wonders, its life of mystery.

Everything that the overpopulation of the area has diminished elsewhere, cobbled together, demarcated by fences, ditches and baulks, is still on a wide scale here. The baulks here are several strips wide, the roads are not lined with ditches, the bends in the villages are like fields elsewhere, and the hay fields prove that the plough could not have overcome these areas before. Across the ravines, over the surface of the water, sit Ukrainian villages, characterised by three-peaked Orthodox churches; crosses stand at the crossroads, and the ravines, twisted like viper's tails, diverge on all sides of the steppe. Indeed, it is only on such meadows that one can still understand 'Farys', one can understand what a brave horse is, what the steppe is for rider and horse! Zlotopil is a truly Ukrainian orchard. Without a fence, without a ditch, without a gate, it is scattered like beads on a tray, and from this slate of houses the domes of the Orthodox church and the church, which stands at the border gate, by the road leading to Mirhorod, run higher.

Zlatopolis used to be part of Prince Ksawery Lubomirski's estate, known under the general name of Smylyanshchyna, and after he sold it to Prince Potemkin, after that magnate's death it passed to his successor, General Nikolai Vysotsky, and from then to the Lopukhins, but not to the princes to whom Korsun belongs. A chapel was built on the site where Zolopol's church stands today, back in 1791, at the expense of the Zolopol treasury, according to church records, 'for the convenience of the officers and military of the Polish crown'.

The present church was rebuilt and enlarged last year thanks to the efforts of the local parish priest, Father Jaworowski. It is neat, but poor. It has no ancient parchments or paintings of an excellent brush, because it was built at the same time as those border dwellers who date their acquisitions in these parts only from a few dozen years ago. Everything here is recent, undetermined, undeveloped: churches, houses and people. The whole advantage of this church is precisely its uniqueness, the charm that the desert gives it. Mohort once kept vigil here; today, the Cross of the Lord keeps vigil on the same spot and "guards the Mohort border!"....