Sudzha

Sudzha stands beside the river of the same name, near its meeting with the Psel. It grew on the forest-steppe frontier where Ukrainian migrants and Cossacks settled under Russian rule. The town's wooden fortifications and surrounding slobodas formed part of the network of settlements that spread south and west of Kursk in the seventeenth century.

After an early settlement was damaged by fire, the government established a fortress town here in 1664 and appointed Gerasim Ragozin as its voivode. Its defences included a small inner fort surrounded by a ditch and a larger enclosure with fourteen towers, four of them containing gates. Sudzha became a company town of the Sumy Cossack regiment, whose organization combined military service with local administration in Sloboda Ukraine.