In this paper we define the fractional Cox–Ingersoll–Ross process as $X_{t}:={Y_{t}^{2}}\mathbf{1}_{\{t<\inf \{s>0:Y_{s}=0\}\}}$, where the process $Y=\{Y_{t},t\ge 0\}$ satisfies the SDE of the form $dY_{t}=\frac{1}{2}(\frac{k}{Y_{t}}-aY_{t})dt+\frac{\sigma }{2}d{B_{t}^{H}}$, $\{{B_{t}^{H}},t\ge 0\}$ is a fractional Brownian motion with an arbitrary Hurst parameter $H\in (0,1)$. We prove that $X_{t}$ satisfies the stochastic differential equation of the form $dX_{t}=(k-aX_{t})dt+\sigma \sqrt{X_{t}}\circ d{B_{t}^{H}}$, where the integral with respect to fractional Brownian motion is considered as the pathwise Stratonovich integral. We also show that for $k>0$, $H>1/2$ the process is strictly positive and never hits zero, so that actually $X_{t}={Y_{t}^{2}}$. Finally, we prove that in the case of $H<1/2$ the probability of not hitting zero on any fixed finite interval by the fractional Cox–Ingersoll–Ross process tends to 1 as $k\to \infty $.