Shui

Shui lies in the wooded uplands south of Yelnya, near the small rivers of the upper Desna basin. Nineteenth-century maps show the village among a scatter of neighbouring settlements in the old border country of Smolensk. The Desna flows south toward the Dnieper, while the surrounding forests and fields occupy the watershed between larger river systems. This countryside lay within lands contested by Lithuania and Moscow during the late medieval and early modern centuries.