Ilya

Ilya stands on the river of the same name north of Minsk. It appears in a written record of 1475 as an estate of the Lithuanian court marshal Bohdan Sakowicz. Later noble owners included the Zabrzeziński and Zbaraski families. By 1564 the settlement was described as a small town, alongside its estate and district; the reforms of 1565–1566 placed it in Minsk county and voivodeship.

The Hlebowicz family held Ilya from 1582 into the late seventeenth century. An inventory of 1650 records a market square, three streets, ninety-three households and ten taverns, giving a much sharper picture of everyday settlement than political boundaries alone. It also mentions a newly built Catholic church and a church that had recently burned. In 1692 Krystyna Hlebowicz and her husband, grand hetman Kazimierz Jan Sapieha, exchanged the estate with Prince Drucki-Sokoliński. Town life thus developed within a succession of private landed possessions.