Verkhovye

Verkhovye lies in the wooded country east of Bely, among the upper waters of the Obsha. The river flows west toward the Mezha and the Western Dvina, linking the district with the wider drainage of the Baltic. Bely was a frontier town contested by Lithuania, Moscow and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; its surrounding villages shared a landscape of forests and cultivated clearings across which armies moved during the wars of the seventeenth century.