Posted in reply to the post by Scott McKeown;173966]Getting back to the original thread question of whether the "correct" reference for Sebastopol residents is "Sebastopolians" or "Sebastopudlians", I would like to see a better defense from those who advocate the use of "Subastopudlians" than I've seen so far. (BTW, I have no doubt that Larry purposefully started this thread with a clearly mischievous but yet humorous intention to get a controversy going among our controversy-obsessed community, which has not disappointed.)
So far the "Sebastopolian" camp has some solid cred going for it. Clearly the town was named after "Sevastopol" on the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine because of the that city holding out under a year-long siege, which won many admirers world-wide while it was happening, including, apparently, enough of the residents of this area in west Sonoma County, which at the time was named "Pine Grove", so that they agreed to change the name of their place to be that of a distant Crimean city. (Incidentally, around that same time there were four other towns in California named "Sebastopol", including what is now Yountville, but only our town kept the name over time, perhaps, I suspect -- and this is [I]total[/I] speculation -- because of our proximity to the Russian outpost of Fort Ross and local Russian history, which includes the naming of Mt. St. Helena...despite the historical antagonism between Russian and Ukraine). Side note: Sevastopol also held out heroically under [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Sevastopol_%281941%E2%80%9342%29:
Axis (Nazi) attack during World War II[/URL].
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