Luchani

Luchani lay beside Lake Luchanskoye, in the forested watershed between the Western Dvina and the rivers flowing toward Lake Ilmen. The lake appears in late fifteenth-century land records as Luchan. The historian Nikolai Barsov proposed identifying the settlement with the chronicle town of Luchin, where Prince Rurik Rostislavich's son was born during a journey from Novgorod to Smolensk in 1173. The lake and neighbouring waterways formed part of a landscape traversed by portage routes.