Smerdyn

Smerdyn was a church centre in the forested country of Novgorod’s Bezhetskaya district. Its earliest known mention is in a birch-bark petition, dated between 1396 and 1422, from the peasants of Smerdyn to the boyar Mikhail Yuryevich. In 1545 the Novgorod survey recorded the Nikolsky pogost of Smerdyn as the centre of a district, with four households. A stone Church of the Sign was built at the churchyard in 1835, adding a new building to the old rural centre.