Vetluga

Vetluga stands on the right bank of the river that gave it its name, amid the forests north of the Volga. In the early seventeenth century the village of Shulepnikovo occupied the site. It later grew into a church settlement called Verkhneye Voskresenye, or Upper Resurrection, on a waterway joining the Volga country to the northern forests.

The settlement and its neighbours belonged to a region where Mari and Russian communities lived along the Vetluga and its tributaries. In 1778 Catherine II made Verkhneye Voskresenye a district town and named it Vetluga. The new town became an administrative centre for a broad river district, while the waterway continued to carry people and goods through the forested valley toward the great Volga.