Myadzyel

Myadzyel lies beside Lake Miastra in a country of lakes and forests. Its earliest fortified settlement stood on an island in nearby Lake Myadzyel, while the later town developed on Miastra's shore. Grand Duke Gediminas mentioned the place in a letter to the archbishop of Riga in 1325. By the fifteenth century it was divided into Old and New Myadzyel; a stone castle stood on a peninsula in the sixteenth. A Baroque church was founded in 1754, and the town passed to Russia in 1793.