ZHITOMIR, or Jitomir, a town of western Russia, capital of the government of Volhynia, is situated on the Tetereff river, 646 miles to the south-west of Moscow. The railway which connects Riga and Königsberg with Odessa, via Berditcheff, passes within 27 miles of the old Lithuanian city without sending a branch towards it; and the whole place, with its old abandoned mansions of the Polish nobility, has an air of decay. Nor is it rich in historical monuments of its troubled past, its churches and cathedral mostly dating from the 18th century. Its population, however, reached 54,830 in 1884,—Jews constituting more than one-third of the total. Two large printing offices in Zhitomir issue nearly one-half of all the Hebrew books printed in Russia. The Jewish merchants carry on a considerable export trade in the agricultural produce of the plains surrounding the city, as also in timber and wooden wares from the forests to the north.

Zhitomir is a very old city, tradition tracing its foundation as far back as the times of Askold and Dir. The annals, however, mention it chiefly in connexion with invasions of the Tartars, who plundered it in the 13th, 14th, and even the 17th century (1606), or in connexion with destructive conflagrations. It fell under Lithuanian rule in 1320, and during the 15th century was one of the fifteen chief cities of the kingdom. Later on it became part of Poland, and when the Cossacks rose under Khmelnitsky (1648) they sacked the town. It became annexed to Russia along with the rest of the Ukraine.