Yotkino

Yotkino lies beside the Mezha River in the wooded country north of Bely. Known by 1701, it served as a parish centre for villages in the surrounding district. The Mezha flows westward through a landscape of forests and bogs toward the Western Dvina. The village stood on a river that once marked a frontier between the lands of Moscow and Lithuania, and its parish connected a dispersed rural population along the river and its tributaries.