Mainly agricultural, its warmer climate supported a variety of crops including wheat, sugar beets, tobacco, barley, and hemp.

[3] Some of the earliest traces of human occupation in Ukraine have been found in Borshchiv Raion and broader Podollia, and several archaeological sites dating back to the Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods are located inside the district.

[4] At Verteba Cave near Bilche-Zolote, traces of the Trypillian culture (dated to c. 5000-3000 BCE) include pottery and ceramics, tools and human and animal bones scattered around a hearth.

Nearby, traces of an associated Neolithic village, called Naddnistriansky Pompei ("Pompeii on the Dniester River") by archaeologists, have been located.

[4] Local Bronze Age artifact assemblages and sites in Borshchiv Raion, including amphorae, pottery and stone cist gravesites, are associated with Thracian and Scythian occupation.

This period of rule brought an influx of Polish nobles, who established serfdoms under which the indigenous Ukrainian inhabitants worked on nobility-owned farms.

[4] After the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire following World War I, Borshchiv Raion again became part of Poland, which reinstated tenant farming.

Simultaneously, a wave of mass emigration was occurring, heralded by extreme levels of poverty and oppressive government policies.

[1] Borshchiv Raion was a roughly wedge-shaped district in southern Ternopil Oblast, western Ukraine, at the convergence of the Galicia, Podollia and Bukovina regions.

[citation needed] Borshchiv Raion sits atop the Podolian Upland, a high plateau pushed up from the ancient Sarmatian Sea by pressure exerted from the shifting Carpathian Mountains, generating abundant deposits of gypsum and limestone.

Supported by abundant rainfall and milder winters than most of Ukraine, the main crops included sugar beets, sunflowers, wheat, barley, tobacco, potatoes, corn and hemp; orchards of fruit and nuts; and honey from apiaries.

[4]: 32 Borshchiv Raion is distinct in its use of heavy embroidery made of thick black wool, thicker than the shirt material, giving the piece a raised texture.

One theory is that the practice originated after invaders killed almost every man in the local villages, and the women adopted the black threads in mourning.

[7] Other legends alternately suggest the practice came to a local woman in a dream to end a drought, or that the black wool was used in hopes it would promote good health and protect wearers from disease.