Orto Xalyma

Orto Xalyma stands on the Kolyma lowland, beside the great river that gives it its Sakha name, “Middle Kolyma.” Lakes, channels and northern woodland surround the settlement, and the smaller Ankudinka divides it into two parts. The river was a meeting place for peoples of the northeast long before Russian forts appeared along its banks.

In the 1640s Cossacks established a fortified post here, known as Yarmanka or the Dog Fort and later as Srednekolymsk. It served as a centre for collecting fur tribute in the Kolyma country. By the eighteenth century its timber walls, more than two metres high in 1764, enclosed a small and remote frontier settlement, where the river linked the fort with distant posts upstream and downstream.