Tsaryovo Gorodishche

Tsaryovo Gorodishche was a settlement on the Tobol River, the predecessor of Kurgan. Its name recalled a large burial mound known as the Tsar’s Kurgan near the original site. The river placed the settlement on a route through the Trans-Ural plain, amid a growing group of Russian villages along the middle Tobol.

The settlement appears in a census of 1680–81, and its foundation is commonly dated to 1679. Timofey Nevezhin is associated with the establishment of the stockade and sloboda. The community developed on the river during the expansion of Russian settlement east of the Urals, becoming the centre of a cluster of settlements on the middle Tobol. In 1782 it received town status under the name Kurgan, derived from the mound that had also helped give the older settlement its name.