Kuretsk

Kuretsk was the medieval town of Kursk, whose earthworks survive on the high right bank of the Lovat beside the village of Kursko. It belonged to the Novgorodian countryside, but its role was more than that of an ordinary farming settlement: it was the centre of the Kursk pogost in the Derevskaya pyatina and of the Kursk tithe of the Novgorod diocese, and the seat of a larger judicial district that included the Ramushevo, Petrovsky, Ustyansky and Nalyuchsky pogosts.

The Novgorod First Chronicle names it in its list of Russian towns, “far and near”. Cadastral books of 1495 call it the small town of Kurske, and Kuretsk was another form of the name used later. The town stood from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, and its administrative reach extended along the Lovat well beyond the settlement itself.