The undistinguished-looking township of Sencha (pop 3,000 and indicated by the red marker) lies in the Poltava oblast (province) of eastern Ukraine, 144 miles south-east of Kiev/Kyiv, 130 miles west of Kharkov/Kharkiv and 88 miles from the provincial capital, the city of Poltava itself.  The closest major centre is Lubny, some 30 miles down the Sula river, which flows on into the Dnieper near Kremenchuk. Poltava province is a centre of the gas and oil industry. But the region is mainly agricultural, with sugar beet, maize and sunflower seeds among the most important crops. There is dairy farming, too.Historically the province, and Sencha with it, has known many overlords, Kievans, Lithuanians, Poles, Cossacks, Russians. In 1709, Poltava was the site of one of the most famous battles in Russian history, when Peter the Great defeated the previously all-conquering Swedes. Between1917 and 1920, in the civil war that followed the Russian revolutions, the area changed hands four or five times before the Soviets eventually prevailed. In 1941-43, after the Holdomor famine of the 1930s, the land was occupied by Nazi Germany.