Staropolye

Staropolye lies in the forested country south-east of the Gulf of Finland, west of Novgorod, where rivers and cultivated clearings supported small rural communities. The cadastral books of Novgorod's Shelonskaya pyatina record it in 1498 as the village of Volovo, one large farmstead in the Sumersky pogost, with the surrounding place called Staropolye.

After Moscow absorbed Novgorod and Pskov in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, this borderland stood in the path of the wars with Livonia. In the Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century Swedish troops and the bands of the Polish-Lithuanian captain Lisowski plundered the district, and for a time the frontier with Sweden ran through the country nearby. In the eighteenth century it became part of Gdov district in the province centred on the new northern capital, St Petersburg, and a Staropolye pogost appears on an 1834 map of St Petersburg province.