Ilyino

Ilyino lies in the wooded country between Velizh and Toropets, near the upper Western Dvina basin. From the fourteenth century the surrounding territory belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and later to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Control shifted during wars with Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, before the region passed to the Russian Empire in the first partition of Poland in 1772. Forests and lakes mark the old frontier landscape around the village.