after the city. Sports The most popular sport is football (soccer). Two professional football teams are based in the city: Vorskla Poltava in the Ukrainian Premier League and FC Poltava in the Second League. There are 3 stadiums in Poltava: Butovsky Vorskla Stadium (main city stadium), Dynamo Stadium are situated in the city centre and Lokomotiv Stadium which is situated in Podil district. Notable people Marie Bashkirtseff (1858–1884) Parisian painter and diarist. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (1884–1963) historian, longest-serving President of Israel from 1952 to 1963. Hanka Bielicka (1915–2006) a Polish singer and actress, known by the name Hanna Oleksandr Bilash (1931–2003) composer of lyric songs, ballads, operas, operettas and oratorios Sofya Bogomolets (1856–1892) a Russian revolutionary and political prisoner. Boris Brasol (1885-1963), lawyer and literary critic and a White Russian immigrant to the United States. Moura Budberg (1892–1974), a Russian adventuress and suspected double agent of OGPU & MI6. Nat Carr (1886–1944) an American character actor of the silent and early talking picture eras. Gregori Chmara (1878–1970) a stage and film actor whose career spanned six decades. Marusia Churai (1625–1653) a semi-mythical Ukrainian Baroque composer, poet, and singer. Andriy Danylko (born 1973) stage name Verka Serduchka; a Ukrainian comedian, actor, and singer. Sam Dreben (1878–1925), a highly decorated soldier in the US Army and a mercenary Vladimir Gajdarov (1893–1978) a Russian film actor and star of Russian and German silent cinema. Yuliy Ganf (1898–1973) a graphic artist, caricaturist, illustrator and poster designer. Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852), a novelist, short story writer and playwright. Alexander Gurwitsch (1874–1954) biologist and medical scientist; originated Morphogenetic field theory Oksana Ivanenko (1906-1997) – Ukrainian children's writer and translator Philip Jaffe (1895–1980) a left-wing American businessman, editor and author. Ernst Jedliczka (1855–1904) a Russian-German pianist, piano pedagogue, and music critic. Mykola Karpov (1929–2003), Ukrainian playwright. Dmitri Kessel (1902–1995), photojournalist, Life magazine 1944–1972 and war correspondent Vera Kholodnaya (1893–1919) an actress of the early Imperial Russian cinema. Yuri Kondratyuk (1897–1942), astronautics and spaceflight pioneer; foresaw reaching the moon Ivan Kotliarevsky (1769–1838) a Ukrainian writer, poet and playwright and social activist Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875–1933) Russian Marxist revolutionary; Bolshevik Soviet people's Commissar Anton Makarenko (1888–1939), educator, social worker and writer and top educational theorist Yuri Levitin (1912–1993) a Soviet Russian composer of classical music. Mykola Lysenko (1842–1912) composer, pianist, conductor; founder first Ukrainian classical music school Patriarch Mstyslav (1898–1993), Ukrainian Orthodox Church hierarch Matvei Muranov (1873–1959) a Ukrainian Bolshevik revolutionary, Soviet