Lalsk

Lalsk takes its name from the Lala, a tributary of the Luza in the eastern Russian North. According to tradition, Novgorodians fleeing Ivan IV's massacre of their city founded the settlement. By the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had become a substantial trading outpost. Its first stone church was consecrated in 1711, and in 1779 Lalsk received town status. The waterways around the settlement connected its merchants with the river systems of the northern interior.