The paper’s subject is tracing the historical memory of the Ukrainian people as evidenced in (broadly understood) phraseological items that contain oikonyms as well as adjectives derived from oikonyms, and refl ect the 19th c. Ukrainians’ perception of their history and neighbouring countries, and also their everyday life, local customs and memorable occurrences related to some inhabited places both in Dnieper Ukraine, then belonging to the Russian Empire, and in Western Ukraine, then part of the Austrian (after 1867, Austrian-Hungarian) Empire. Some of the phraseological units discussed in the paper and drawn from M. Nomys’ 1864 collection “Ukrainian sayings, proverbs and the like” are recorded in modern dictionaries, while the others are only found in the 19th - early 20th c. dictionaries. The author attempts to elucidate the origin and meaning of phraseologisms that are incomprehensible for Present-day Ukrainian speakers. In her reconstruction of relevant fragments of the 19th c. Ukrainians’ world picture, she uses the methods of historical-linguistic and linguistic-cultural analysis, also taking into account extralinguistic data.