I am not a historian. I hold no specialist degree, no academic title, and no reader's card to any archival reading room. I am simply a person who one day became curious about the history of his village and could not stop.

Professionally I work with artificial-intelligence technologies, RAG systems, and analytical tools. When I realized that the history of Horodkivka was scattered across dozens of primary sources of the 16th–19th centuries — in Polish, Latin, and Church Slavonic — I brought my goal together with my means.

How it works

I make no secret of the fact that the texts of these articles were written with the help of AI. But that does not mean AI did the work for me. Every thesis, every source, every line of inquiry was vetted by me personally. AI is a tool, not an author. As a scanner is to someone who hunts for documents, or a calculator to someone who counts.

My method rests on getting to the primary source — the original document: the register, the act, the map, the diary. In most cases this is possible. But not always: some archival material is not available online, and some has survived only in later copies or retellings. Where the original is out of reach, I cross-check the information against several independent sources — and I say so. Where I advance a theory, I mark it clearly as such.

On errors

Precisely because this is a research project and not an academic monograph, there may be mistakes here: chronological, logical, orthographic. Some topics I may simply not have worked through. If I have not mentioned something — it does not mean it did not happen. It means it has not yet been studied.

If you spot an inaccuracy or have additional material — I will be grateful for any help.

Acknowledgements

The inspiration for this project was the community «Horodkivka. Historical Heritage» on Facebook, which since 2019 has been collecting and studying the history of the village. Much of what I have «rediscovered» in primary sources — they had already found and published long before me. My aim was to reach the primary sources themselves — the registers, the acts, the maps — and bring them together. But without their work and their enthusiasm this study would scarcely exist.