Gayny

Gayny stands on the right bank of the upper Kama, in the forest country north of Kudymkar. Its Komi-Permyak name is Gajna. The settlement appears as a pogost, a rural parish centre, in the first census of Great Perm in 1579. This is a date of documentary attestation, rather than proof that the community was founded in that year. The river placed it within the northern Kama country, well away from the great urban centres of Muscovy.

The surrounding district was associated with Komi-Permyak communities and a dense network of rivers. Forests, water and a short growing season shaped the physical setting of settlement, while the pogost provided a fixed point in this dispersed countryside. By the imperial period Gayny was the centre of Gayny volost in Cherdyn county. Its early history is consequently that of a northern rural centre on the Kama, rather than the much later industrial logging settlement. Written administration and parish organisation became part of an older landscape whose routes followed the river and its tributaries.