Haradok

Haradok stands beside the Harazhanka River and Lake Luhavoye, north of Vitebsk. Its early modern importance grew from fortification and local administration. After Muscovite forces destroyed the castle at Yeziaryshcha, a bastioned castle was built at Haradok in the late sixteenth century, and the settlement became a volost centre. Tomasz Makowski's map, published in Amsterdam in 1613, marked it as a small town in the Vitebsk voivodeship of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

This was a frontier landscape in which a fortified settlement could organise the surrounding countryside as well as offer protection. The First Partition of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth transferred Haradok to the Russian Empire in 1772, when it received town status. A new coat of arms followed in 1781. By 1802 it was the administrative centre of a district in Vitebsk Governorate. The river-and-lake setting remained the same, but the institutions through which the town served its rural hinterland changed from Lithuanian local jurisdiction to an imperial district administration.