Syanno

Syanno lies south-west of Vitebsk in a landscape of woods and lakes. Known as an estate of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1534, it appears in records of 1595 as an estate, castle and small town. The castle survived into the eighteenth century. The Sapieha family held Syanno in the seventeenth century, followed by the Ogińskis; in 1772 it passed to Russia in the first partition of the Commonwealth.