City on the Teterev River (a tributary of the Dnieper); administrative center of Ukraine’s Zhytomyr oblast. In existence since the ninth century, Zhytomyr (Rus., Zhitomir; Pol., Żytomierz) was from the 1330s attached to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and from 1569 it was a district center of Kiev province in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. From 1793, it belonged to the Russian Empire, and from 1795 it served as a provincial center.