Karachev

Karachev stood on the Snezhet River, a tributary of the Desna, in the wooded country between Bryansk and the upper Oka lands. A medieval princely centre, it entered the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the fourteenth century and passed to Moscow in 1503. Its position then made it a frontier fortress, exposed to warfare with Lithuania and Poland and to Crimean Tatar raids.

The Time of Troubles brought further conflict before the town's place within Russia was confirmed by the settlement of 1618. As the frontier moved west, Karachev's life increasingly centred on its district, churches and markets. The Resurrection Monastery developed beside the town in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries around the ascetic Tikhon of Karachev. By 1745 the town had ten churches, four of them stone-built, and ecclesiastical foundations formed prominent landmarks among its timber houses. Late eighteenth-century provincial reforms made Karachev a district centre in the Oryol administration. A regular plan approved in 1780 imposed a new framework on the old settlement, whose riverbanks, suburban communities and roads still reflected centuries of growth around a fortified core.