After the suppression of another national liberation uprising led by Hetman Taras Tryasil in 1631, the Commonwealth tried to take control of Zaporozhye. In February 1635, King Vladislav IV VAZA and the Sejm decided to build a fortress near the first Dnieper threshold - Kodatsky, in order to block the Zaporizhian fleet from Samara. The very name "Kodak" in translation from Turkic means "settlement on the mountain."

The commander, crown hetman Stanislav Kontsepolsky, was to oversee the construction of the fortress, and the French engineer de Beauplan was to build it. The plan of the fortress itself later served as N.V. Gogol as a model of military fortification when creating the story "Taras Bulba".
The Kodak Fortress was built in record time - from spring to August 1635. Along the perimeter, the bastion rectangle was 1800 m. From the west, the fortress rose above the Dnieper, from the steppe it was surrounded by a moat. From the south, iron thorns were scattered across the field (against the cavalry). The garrison was up to 1000 people. A Catholic monastery and a trading settlement, a settlement, were built. The first commandant was the French officer Jean Marion - "the old warrior", as the great Lithuanian chancellor Albrecht Radziwill called him. The "Old Warrior" forbade the Cossacks not only to leave Samara, but also to engage in crafts on the Dnieper. But already on the night of August 12, the Cossacks, led by Sulima, returning from the Crimean campaign, suddenly appeared in the fortress. The garrison was slaughtered. They captured Marion alive, poured gunpowder into his clothes, put him on a stake and set him on fire. The explosion pushed Marion into the Dnieper.
In December 1635, the Sulima uprising was suppressed, and on March 7, 1636, a universal of Vladislav IV was issued: to send people to all cities and settlements of Ukraine to restore the Kodak fortress. The work was completed in July 1639. The fortress was almost tripled in size. Now the night watch has been strengthened. Yan Zholtovsky became the governor of Kodak, the nephew of the crown hetman Adam Kontsepolsky became the commandant. The crown hetman himself came to inspect the fortress. Along the way, he invited some gentry to show the power of Poland firsthand. So Bogdan Khmelnitsky, a centurion of the Chigirinsky regiment, found himself surrounded by Kontsepolsky. Satisfied with the crown hetman, he began to mock the Cossacks, saying that there was no more reason for uprisings (ie, weak sides), to which B. Khmelnitsky replied: "Created by hand, by hand it is destroyed." These words became prophetic.
In addition to B. Khmelnitsky, other leaders of the future liberation war also visited Kodak. So one of the heroes, Ivan Bogun, served here for two years, receiving 30 gold pieces a year for his service. With the outbreak of the War of Liberation in the spring of 1648, a Polish detachment was sent to Kodak to strike from here at the Sich, which was located on Nikitin Rog (Nikopol). But Bohdan Khmelnitsky seized the initiative, organizing his camp at the Novy Kodak fortress (founded in 1645) and defeated the Poles in the battle of Zhovti Vody. In 1998, on the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the beginning of the War of Liberation, a monument was erected on the battlefield near Zhovti Vody in honor of the victory. Kodak was under siege. In 1910, D. Yavornytsky, in the inscription on the monument in honor of the capture of the fortress, determined the date of this event as the spring of 1648. In fact, the Cossacks did not take the Kodak fortress by storm. Bogdan Khmelnytsky sent here three selected regiments led by M. Nesterenko, known as one of the organizers of intelligence and counterintelligence, and P. Shumeiko, a Chigirinsky and non-female colonel. The siege was clearly not long. Despite their boasting, the Polish military leaders were quick to throw out the white flag. On October 1, 1648, in exchange for a free exit, they left the fortress along with the guns.
In the March Articles of the Russian-Ukrainian Treaty of 1654, Kodak is described as a city on the border with the Crimea ": in which the hetman always keeps 400 people and feeds them:". Until 1656, Kodak was subordinate to the hetman's government, and then passed into the jurisdiction of the Zaporozhian Sich and played an important role during the Ruins (1661-1688). In 1688, hetman Ivan Mazepa ordered the construction of the Novobogoriditskaya fortress on the right bank of the river. Samara at the confluence with the Dnieper (now the territory of the village named after Shevchenko, which is part of the city). Located on the border of the Hetmanate, Zaporozhye, Poland, Kodak became an important center of political activity.
The support of the pro-Swedish orientation of Ivan Mazepa by the Cossacks led to the fact that in the spring of 1709 a punitive detachment of the Moscow army destroyed Kodak and the Zaporozhian Sich. But according to the Treaty of Prut with Turkey (1711), the border passed along the Samara River. The fortresses were to be destroyed. The territory was taken over by the Crimean Khan, who in the 20s of the XVIII century. transferred the rights to the ruins to the Polish government. However, the city itself has developed. In 1736–1737 two churches are being built in Old Kodak. Since 1739, people from Poltava and Chernihiv regions have been moving here. The center moves to New Kodak - the center of the Cossack tent of the Zaporozhian Host. There is an office, a court, an administration, a school, a crossing over the Dnieper, a cathedral church, at which there were seven priests and four deacons (1773). The further fate of the Old Kodak is tragic. Its archaeological research was carried out by D. Yavornitsky, but all the results of this work were lost during World War II. In 1944, a granite quarry was laid on the territory of the fortress, and by 1994 it had destroyed about 90% of Kodak.