Ustyuzhensky district

Ustyuzhna

Ustyuzhna is a regional city, the center of the Ustyuzhensky district of the Vologda Oblast, and it is located 250 kms to the southwest from Vologda, 125 kms from Cherepovets on the river Mologa flowing into the Rybinsk Reservoir.

The admitted date of Ustyuzhna's foundation is 1252. The name of the city is connected to its location - in the mouth of the river Izhin running in to the Mologa. In the XVI - XVII centuries the city became a known weapon center of the Russian state. During the Northern war under the decree of Peter the Great iron producing factories working for equipment of the Russian fleet were opened in Ustyuzhna.

Today it is a city, surrounded by pine forests, with parks of the lilac, which has kept the picturesque buildings of merchant time – houses of the Pozdeevs, of Ryabov that was visited by writer A.I.Kuprin, original monuments of orthodox architecture - the cathedral of the Nativity of the Virgin (XVII century), the Kazan church (XVIII century).

15 kms from Ustyuzhna, in the village Danilovskoe, there is Batyushkovs’ former manor which originally belonged to the father of poet Konstantin Nikolaevich Batyushkov, and on the edge of the XIX-XX centuries - to the historian of literature Feodor Batyushkov. In 1906-1911 in the manor there lived and worked writer Alexander Kuprin. The manor Danilovskoe is a classical wooden one-storeyed house with an attic and 6-balcony portico, near the house there's an ancient park. Now here's located the Batyushkovs and Kuprin memorial-literary museum.

N.V.Gogol's bibliographers confirm the fact, that the incident on which the plot of his comedy «Auditor» is based really happened in the city of Ustyuzhna. The prototype of the governor of the town was a local nobleman Maksheev Ivan Aleksandrovich.

The city of Ustyuzhna is a place of tourist attraction due to its historical, literary destiny, monuments of architecture and landscape gardening art.

On the left bank of the river Vorozh, on the former Cathedral Square the five-domed cathedral of the Nativity of the Virgin is located (1685-1690, 1721-1730), with the adjacent winter church with 4 side altars (in the interior there’s a five-tiered carved gilded iconostasis of the end of XVII century, wall painting and stucco moulding, 1759-1764).

In the going south-east of the Cathedral Square Moscow Street one can see a five-domed Kazan church (1694) in the Naryshkin Baroque style with rich white-washed decor and a tentlike belltower (1764-1767).