Prior to World War II, Trembowla was a county seat within the Tarnopol Voivodeship of the Second Polish Republic.

Prior to the Holocaust, the city was home to 1,486 Jews, and most of them (around 1,100) were shot by Germans in the nearby village of Plebanivka on April 7, 1943.

It was fully incorporated into Poland in 1430 during the reign of king Władysław II Jagiełło, while his son Casimir IV Jagiellon granted the town limited Magdeburg Rights.

It was part of the system of border fortifications of the Polish Kingdom and later the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth against Moldavian and Wallachian incursions.

The town also later resisted frequent invasion by the Crimean Tatars, the Ottomans and the Zaporozhian Cossacks from the south and southeast.

The town was the seat of the famous starost and the most successful 16th-century anti-Tatar Polish commander Bernard Pretwicz, who died there in 1563.

Following the Polish–Ukrainian War, Trembowla reverted to Polish rule, and served as seat of a county in Tarnopol Voivodeship.

In the first month of the German occupation, Ukrainian police arrested, tortured, and shot forty Jews.

[9] During World War II, Trembowla and the surrounding areas also witnessed mass murders of ethnic Poles.

It formerly housed the painting of Our Lady of Trembowla, which was moved to St. Catherine Church in Gdańsk after World War II.

Terebovlia also has a Roman Catholic church of Saint Peter and Paul, designed in 1927 by architect Adolf Szyszko-Bohusz.