Kalyazin

Kalyazin grew beside the Volga and the mouth of the Zhabnya around monasteries and the settlements that served them. In the fifteenth century the monk Makary left a monastery at Kashin with seven companions and established the Trinity Monastery on the opposite bank of the Volga. Its lands and influence expanded over the following centuries, drawing pilgrims and craftsmen to the district. By the seventeenth century its estates extended across the Kashin, Dmitrov and Uglich districts.

During the Time of Troubles, Mikhail Skopin-Shuisky gathered his forces near the monastery in 1609 and won an important victory over Polish-Lithuanian troops near Kalyazin. The monastery itself was subsequently plundered in 1610 and rebuilt after the devastation. The settlements around it continued to grow, and Catherine II granted Kalyazin town status in 1775. A regular town plan was approved the following year and largely carried out by the beginning of the nineteenth century, giving the old monastic settlement an ordered urban form.