Asvieja

Asvieja lies beside the lake of the same name in the northern reaches of the old Polotsk lands. Mentioned in the fifteenth century, it was a centre of a district within Polotsk Voivodeship under the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Kishka family held it in the sixteenth century, and Kazimierz Jan Sapieha founded an Orthodox church there in 1667. The first partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth brought Asvieja under Russian rule in 1772.