KAMENETS PODOLSKIY, or PODOLIAN KAMENETS (

Polish Kamieniec)  , a town of S.-W . Russia, chief town of the government of Podolia . It stands in 48° 40' N. and 26° 30' E., on a high, rocky bluff of the river Smotrich, a left .hand tributary of the Dniester, and near the Austrian frontier . Pop . (1863), 20,699; (1900) 39,113, of whom 50% were Jews and 30% Poles . Round the town lies a cluster of suburban villages, Polish Folwark, Russian Folwark, Zinkovtsui, Karvasarui, &c.; and on the opposite side of the river, accessible by a wooden bridge, stands the castle which long frowned defiance across the Dniester to Khotin in Bessarabia . Kamenets is the see of a Roman Catholic and a Greek Orthodox bishop . The Roman Catholic cathedral of St Peter and St Paul, built in 1361, is distinguished by a minaret, recalling the time when it was used as a mosque by the Turks (r672-1699) . The Greek cathedral of John the Baptist dates from the 16th century, but up to 1798 belonged to the Basilian monastery . Other buildings are the Orthodox Greek monastery of the Trinity, and the Catholic Armenian church (founded in 1398), possessing a 14th-century missal and an image of the Virgin Mary that saw the Mongol invasion of 1239 1242 . The town contains Orthodox Greek and Roman Catholic seminaries, Jewish colleges, and an archaeological museum for church antiquities, founded in 189o . Kamenets was laid waste by the Mongol leader Batu in 1240 .

In 1434 it was made the chief town of the

province of Podolia . In the 15th and 16th centuries it suffered frequently from the invasions of Tatars, Moldavians and Turks; and in 1672 the hetman of the Cossacks, Doroshenko, assisted by Sultan Mahommed IV. of Turkey, made himself master of the place . Restored to Poland by the peace of Karlowitz (1699), it passed with Podolia to Russia in 1795 . Here the Turks were defeated by the Poles in 1633, and here twenty years later peace was concluded between the same antagonists . The fortifications were demolished in 1813 .