It was in the border town of Nezhin, ‘Nizhna’ in the Greek sources, in what is today north-eastern Ukraine, that the ‘Brotherhood of the Greeks’ with its religious and trading privileges and its arbitration court was established in the closing years of the seventeenth century.

The members of this ‘Brotherhood of the Greeks’ called themselves ‘Romioi’, denoting that they were Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire; theirs was thus ‘the Brotherhood of the Romioi of Nizhna’ or alternatively ‘of Kazakia’. In the Russian and Ukrainian texts of the time these Romioi are called ‘Greeks’ or ‘Greki’. It is only in very specific contexts, and towards the end of the century, that the term ‘Hellene’ is used with respect to this particular group. Though it is true that many members of the ‘Brotherhood’ spoke Greek only as a second language, it should be noted that the official language of their communal institutions, both secular and religious, was Greek. Following Troian Stoianovich's characterization of these his ‘conquering’ merchants, this should be considered just as much a Brotherhood of the Balkan Orthodox as a Brotherhood of Greeks, though arguably the distinction would have been lost on most of its members.

Nezhin was far from the precarious coast, and did not lie on any of the significant fluvial arteries linking Ukrainian territories with the Black Sea littoral.