Ivdel

Ivdel lies on the eastern side of the northern Urals, where its namesake river joins the Lozva drainage. The earlier Russian foothold in this country was Lozvinsky gorodok, a wooden stronghold established in 1589 near the confluence of the Ivdel and Lozva. It occupied a river junction important to the first routes linking the Urals with western Siberia. When the new route through Verkhoturye displaced the older passage, the fort was abandoned at the end of the sixteenth century.

The settlement associated with the later town had a different beginning. In 1831 a gold-working establishment appeared on the Ivdel near the mouth of the Shapsha, upstream from the later urban site. The settlement was also called Shapsha and grew around the washing of gold-bearing sands from nearby workings. This small industrial beginning belonged to a much older Mansi forest country, whose inhabitants used rivers, fishing grounds and hunting territories. Ivdel's history within the period therefore includes two separate episodes of Russian settlement: a short-lived frontier fort and, more than two centuries later, an enterprise connected with the Ural gold industry.