Vasilsursk

Vasilsursk (colloquially Vasil; in Mari, Shurdyng, "mouth of the Sura") is an urban-type settlement in Vorotynsky District of Nizhny Novgorod Region, on the high right bank of the Volga at the point where the Sura flows into it, on the border with Mari El. It was founded on September 1, 1523, as the fortress of Vasilyev Novgorod, Moscow's forward post on the Kazan bank of the border river; for 143 years it was a district town of the Nizhny Novgorod Governorate, and today about six hundred people live there. ^[1][4][11]

Place and name

The settlement stands on the slope of a hill at the very mouth of the Sura. The hill is high, about 240 feet above the river, and it has no lower quarter (podol): it has been washed away by the waters of the two rivers, both of which strike the right bank. The soil of the hill is clayey with an admixture of marl, underground springs run inside it, and the ground beneath the town is constantly subsiding ^[7]. Vasil lies 169¾ versts from Nizhny Novgorod ^[6].

The town's Russian name changed three times: Vasilyev Novgorod, in honor of Grand Prince Vasily III, then Vasilgorod, then Vasilsursk, after the Sura at whose mouth it was built; in everyday speech the short form Vasil stuck, and the present spelling was fixed only in the 1920s ^[17]. The settlement's Mari name is Shurdyng, "mouth of the Sura" ^[13]. The name readily splits into vasilki (cornflowers) and surki (marmots), an old and persistent joke.

For its view of the confluence of the two rivers, Vasilsursk is called the "Volga Switzerland" ^[12]; in pre-revolutionary descriptions it was the "Nizhny Novgorod Switzerland" and the "Little Zhiguli" ^[5]. Old guidebooks wrote that "the most beautiful places on the whole Volga are Plyos, Nizhny Novgorod, the Zhiguli, and Vasilsursk" ^[4].

Tsepel: A Town Before the Town

The mouth of the Sura was settled as early as the Bronze Age and the early Iron Age. In and around present-day Vasilsursk, four hillforts dating from the 2nd millennium BC to the 1st millennium AD are known, along with the "Repishche" hillfort of the late 1st to early 2nd millennium, whose upper layers are Mari ^[1].

On the hill stood a fortified town of the Hill Mari — Tsepel; it is placed roughly where the settlement's central square is today. According to tradition, there stood here a palace of the Cheremis princes surrounded by ramparts and moats, and by some accounts it was the capital of the Hill Mari ^[1]. The word "tsepel" is of Finno-Ugric origin and means "bitter water" ^[1].

Legend has preserved the name of a local prince, Alash, whom the supreme god Kugu-Yumo turned into a sterlet for disobedience; he became the king of the sterlets in Lake Annino, not far from Vasilsursk ^[1].

Traces of the fortifications on Tsepel were still visible in the 1870s, but even then "town gardens had been planted in many places; some moats were filled in with earth, and the ramparts leveled" ^[1]. Today two fragments of the ramparts remain: one marks the northern end of the central square — a stairway down to the shops has been built through the rampart — while the other rises in the middle of Marx Street, half a kilometer from the square ^[2].

1523: A Fortress on the Kazan Bank

The pretext for the campaign was the treacherous murder in Kazan of Russian merchants and the sovereign's envoy, Vasily Yuryev Pozhogin ^[6]. On August 23, 1523, Vasily III arrived in Nizhny Novgorod — the Moscow princes did not spoil the city with their visits, and the arrival meant that special importance was being attached to the eastern frontier ^[3]. The Grand Prince himself remained in Nizhny, sending his voivodes (military commanders) into the Kazan lands ^[6].

The Typographic Chronicle puts it briefly: "and from Novgorod he sent many of his voyevodas and people with them and commanded them to cut a town on the Sura River. They went, cut the town, and gave it a name, in the name of the Grand Prince, Vasilgorod" ^[3]. The wooden fortress was built in September 1523 on the Kazan, right bank of the border river Sura, at its confluence with the Volga ^[2]; the town's opening fell on the very day of the new year 7032, that is, on September 1 ^[6]. For the security of the new town, set on foreign land, a rampart and an ostrog were built ^[6]. At its founding, a Church of the Intercession of the Mother of God, with side chapels of the Archangel Michael and Nicholas the Wonderworker, was raised in the fortress ^[2].

A fortress on a foreign bank read as a challenge, and it was perceived that way both in Kazan and in Europe ^[3].

Its role was more modest than the legend suggests: control of the mouth of the Sura, prevention of minor raids, and, above all, timely warning to Nizhny Novgorod of the movement of large forces. Vasilgorod supplemented and reinforced the position of Nizhny, rather than replacing it ^[3].

afterward this fortress became the source of many calamities

One hundred and fifty miles above Kazan, at the confluence of the Sura River, the now-reigning Vasily founded the town of Suritsk, with the aim of establishing in this deserted place a reliable and safe haven with inns and shops for merchants and travelers, who inform the nearest frontier commanders of Tatar affairs and the movements of this restless tribe

The Yarmarka That Moved to Makaryev

Vasily III wanted to give the new town commercial importance: he forbade Russian merchants to travel to the Arsk yarmarka in Kazan and ordered them to trade in Vasil ^[6]. The plan was noticed at once — Paolo Giovio wrote about "inns and shops for merchants" just two years after the founding ^[3].

Trade here, however, did not flourish. The fair stayed at Vasilsursk for about a hundred years and from 1624 began to pass to Makaryev Monastery, where many pilgrims came ^[6]; from there in 1817 it partially moved to Nizhny Novgorod, and the opening of the fair at its new location took place in 1822 ^[4]. Thus the Nizhny Novgorod fair traces its lineage to the Makaryev one, and that one to the Vasilsursk fair.

Vasil lost its military significance even before the fall of Kazan: in 1550, almost at the very gates of Kazan, Sviyazhsk was built, which became Russia's eastern stronghold ^[6]. Until 1552 the town suffered devastation several times: in 1536, on Christmas night, the Kazan people took it without a single shot, and three years later plundered it again ^[5]. In 1552, on his way to Kazan, Ivan the Terrible visited here, sampled the local dishes, and called the town the "sterlet capital" ^[4].

The Mountain That Creeps

A little over thirty years after its founding, the town suffered a catastrophe. In 1556, during the spring flood, the Volga swallowed the mouth of the Sura, pushing its channel far to the south, and an enormous landslide carried the lower streets and a church, together with the worshippers, into the river ^[9]. The Nikon Chronicle under the year 7064 recorded: "Concerning Vasil-gorod. In that same year Vasil-gorod was moved, and it was reduced from below, and built along the mountain"; Karamzin retold this more briefly: "Vasilgorod was moved up onto the mountain" ^[2]. The architectural historian A. I. Davydov dates the day of the catastrophe to April 29, 1556, connecting it with the legend of the "miraculous transfer" of the Pokrovsky Cathedral across the Volga, to Lake Nestiar ^[2]. According to this legend, the church still lies at the bottom of the lake beyond the Volga, and the righteous hear church singing on the shore ^[9].

Where exactly the first fortress stood is still disputed. Until 1961 all researchers believed it was placed "halfway up the mountain," on the hummocky surface of an ancient landslide terrace; measurements of the ramparts and ditches on Tsepel were first published by the Kazan professor K. F. Fuks in 1828: a platform 284 sazhens long and up to 207 sazhens wide, two ramparts and eight ditches. I. A. Kiryanov in 1961 insisted that the fortress had stood on the summit from the very beginning, and described it as an irregular rectangle of 603 by 400 meters with a perimeter of about two kilometers, with a low rampart and a ditch all around ^[2].

The common version of a stone kremlin "with six towers" rests on a translation error. The Italian Raffaele Barberini, who visited here in 1565, called the fortification "uno castello murato," that is, simply a fortress surrounded by walls, with no indication of the material; the Russian chronicles, however, state directly that in 1523 the fortress was built of timber ^[2]. According to some descriptions, then, a stone kremlin stood on the mountain, and according to others, a wooden ostrog, and the chronicles side with the latter.

Landslides remained the town's permanent affliction. In 1877, V. F. Kudryavtsev wrote that the wooden houses stood at a tilt, "even the church itself has sunk unevenly"; the residents were allotted a new site up above, but nothing was built there except the stone ostrog (fortress-prison) — the distance from the water and from the marketplace, the only one in town, kept people from moving ^[7]. Brockhaus, thirty years later, noted the same: "Cases of landslides in Vasilsursk are frequent in summer" ^[6].

In the late 1920s and the 1930s, annual landslides carried away an entire street behind the cathedral. The stone cathedral, built in 1813–1828 on the site of a burned wooden one, developed cracks, and in 1939 it began to be dismantled for brick. The cemetery Smolensk Church, founded in 1901 and consecrated on July 27, 1902, by Nazary, Bishop of Nizhny Novgorod and Arzamas, remained in use until 1939, was demolished in 1975, and in 2006 a chapel was erected on its foundation ^[9]. A major landslide in 1986 carried several houses and outbuildings into the Volga; there were no casualties ^[5].

The Sura and the Volga at Vasilsursk washed against various parts of the town; later the marketplace and a whole row of houses standing closer to the water vanished beneath the water, but about five years ago the Sura, over two springs, cut through an isthmus a hundred sazhens (about 213 meters) long and began flowing into the Volga at an entirely different place. And now it is not the Sura but the Volga that undermines the Vasilsursk bluff. In Vasilsursk you can see paved streets running straight off into nowhere

The district town of Vasil

In 1708, Vasil was assigned to Kazan Governorate — it became one of its seventy-one towns ^[6][9]. Since December 1779 it has been a district town of the Nizhny Novgorod Viceroyalty and remained one for 143 years ^[4]; in 1781 its coat of arms and plan were instituted, and the sloboda (settlement) of Khmelevka was incorporated into the town ^[9].

The town was tiny. The census of 1646 counted 223 people in it — "among them one tailor, one blacksmith, two yaryzhki (hired hands), one shepherd, and 4 beggars" ^[6]. In 1670, during the rebellion of Stepan Razin, the people of Vasil rose up, but upon learning that Prince Baryatinsky had executed sixty residents of Kozmodemyansk, they surrendered to him voluntarily and begged for mercy ^[6].

Brockhaus put the town's revenues at roughly five thousand rubles a year ^[6]; by other accounts, the town had an income of fifteen thousand with a population of fifteen hundred, was famous for its orchards, embroidery, spice cakes (pryaniki), samovars, and sterlet that sold like hotcakes, and by the end of the 19th century had grown to three thousand people ^[5]. The cathedral church housed an icon of St. Varlaam of Khutyn, donated, judging by its inscription, in 1642; the town's oldest educational institution is the district school, opened in 1829 ^[6].

The Catherine (Kazan) Road ran through Vasil, and along it came the convoys of prisoners bound for Siberia ^[4]. In spring, caravans of ships and barges came down the Sura; at the river's mouth they stopped and sometimes waited for a month for the steamboats that would tow them to Rybinsk: "the arrival of a caravan at high water gives Vasilsursk the look of a port city" ^[6].

Royal personages passed through here. In 1722, after celebrating his fiftieth birthday in Nizhny Novgorod, Peter I visited Vasil: he was struck by the oak grove near the town, ordered it protected as a preserve, commanded that it be guarded and new oaks planted, and, according to tradition, planted one oak with his own hands — the best oaks went to shipbuilding ^[4]. Catherine II stopped here in May 1767 on her way from Tver to Simbirsk; Paul I came in 1798, returned part of the lands to the town, and approved a development plan ^[4]. In September 1833 Pushkin passed through, gathering information about the Pugachev rebellion; he stayed in the settlement of Khmelyovka ^[4], and in his surviving notes he mentioned Major General V. A. Kar and the tradition of Pugachev's reprisal in Kurmysh against Second Major Vasily Yurlov — whom Pushkin later portrayed under the surname Mironov in "The Captain's Daughter" ^[5].

went with an officer to the top of the hill, where the remains of an ancient fortification can be seen, shallow ditches and an overgrown rampart... According to the new plan a town is to be here and the site has been surveyed; several houses were built, but there were no residents, and they have partly rotted, partly been carried down below. At the top there is only a building for government offices made of brick, stone, lime, and sand. Prince Vyazemsky tried to set up a marketplace here, but without success

Resort, summer residents, and artists

From the second half of the 19th century, Vasilsursk became one of the favorite vacation spots on the Volga Region: it had large rest homes, tourist camps, and an anti-tuberculosis sanatorium for children of all-Union importance ^[4]. Summer residents came from afar: before the revolution, people came to spend the summer on Vasilsursk's streets from Baku, where a cholera outbreak began every summer ^[10].

The reason for the resort's fame is its climate and its views.

Any old-timer will point out "Shishkin Cape" — the place where Ivan Shishkin painted his landscapes; one of the ridges above the river is still called "Shishkin Forest" ^[11][12]. In the spring of 1887, on his first trip to the Volga, Isaac Levitan came here and stayed for two months; this trip produced "The Apiary," "Flood on the Sura," and the study "Vasilsursk," which ended up in the collection of the Polenov Museum-Reserve ^[15]. He also painted "Village near Vasilsursk" here ^[11]. Earlier descriptions of the settlement also link the start of work on "Evening on the Volga" to this summer — the chronicle of the artist's life places this painting in the following summer, 1888, at Plyos ^[15]. According to Vasilsursk tradition, V. D. Polenov also worked here: no documentary evidence of this has survived, but local memory holds his name firmly — and the study "Vasilsursk" did end up in the Polenov museum's collection.

Among Soviet landscape painters, N. M. Romadin and USSR People's Artist V. N. Baksheev came here — according to earlier descriptions of the settlement, Baksheev worked here in 1939, and Romadin almost every summer in the 1940s ^[4]. Feodor Chaliapin, the artist M. Kh. Aladzhalov, and Ilya Glazunov also visited ^[4]. The artist M. M. Radonezhsky was born and grew up in Vasilsursk ^[4], and the childhood home of Mosfilm production designer Konstantin Stepanov stands a couple of blocks from the museum: the Art Nouveau building was begun as a dacha by Vladimirsky, a notary of the Nizhny Novgorod Yarmarka. Stepanov worked with Grigory Chukhray, Leonid Gaidai, and Karen Shakhnazarov, and his drawings preserved views of Vasilsursk that no longer exist ^[10].

In the summer of 1899, Maxim Gorky stayed here — with his wife Ekaterina Pavlovna and their little son Maxim, at the dacha of his friends the Kilchevskys; that summer he was finishing "Foma Gordeyev" ^[11][12].

The place where he lived is called the "Eagle's Nest" ^[4]; the writer Skitalets explained the name.

The "Eagle's Nest" viewing platform has been preserved and is protected: among centuries-old trees and ornamental shrubs — lilac, spiraea, acacia — a monument to the writer has been erected. Vladimir Vernadsky began his scientific research here while still a student ^[4]; Kirill Lavrov stayed at the rest home on numerous occasions ^[4].

The climate of the town is temperate and healthy. Because the town sits on a hillside, there are neither strong winds nor destructive thunderstorms here. Spring is cold, and the weather during spring is changeable; but summer is warm, and therefore plums, pears, and especially apples can grow here, reaching a rare and remarkable size

If only you knew how wonderful it is here! Great beauty — it is wide and free, one breathes easily, the weather is cool. Do stop by for a day! There is still a lot of water in the Volga, and you would have a splendid trip

merging, they form a vast expanse of water, and above it, as in a fairy tale, rises a cone-shaped, green, garden-covered, high hill... Gorky, who was writing "Foma Gordeyev" at the time, entirely in the grip of the Volga's horizons, steeped in the Volga's tales, climbed up then to the very top, to the very spire of the pointed Vasilsursk hill, where under the eternal wind the old giants — the black poplars — droned, their mighty branches covering the little gray house in which he lived that summer. It was, as it were, an Eagle's Nest, and, it seems, that is indeed what this place in Vasilsursk was called

War

During the Great Patriotic War, several evacuation hospitals operated in Vasilsursk, and many evacuees lived there, including orphaned children from besieged Leningrad. For two years the town was home to students and teachers of the Bolshoi Theatre's ballet choreographic school, led by N. I. Tarasov and the ballet master K. Ya. Goleizovsky ^[4]. The local club was converted into a theater, and Bolshoi dancers Raisa Struchkova, Anatoly Lascari, and Violetta Bovt continued their rehearsals there; the club has not survived ^[11].

Among the residents of the settlement are two Heroes of the Soviet Union; their portraits and biographies are displayed on stands at the local history museum, and on the square stands a monument to the soldiers who died in the war ^[11].

Mari Shrines Nearby

Near the settlement are natural monuments connected with the traditional cults of the Hill Mari. The chief of them is the Tsepelsky sacred grove with the sacred spring Suprotivny Klyuch ("Opposing Spring"), dedicated to the supreme god Kugu-Yumo ^[13]. The spring is so named because its water flows "against the sun" ^[12].

N. N. Ogloblin, writing in the early twentieth century, described the prayers at Suprotivny Klyuch as held on August 28–29 (Old Style): food and scraps of cloth were offered as sacrifice, and in the early nineteenth century sacrificial stones stood here. The spring was revered by Russians and Chuvash alike, and there was an Orthodox chapel nearby; today there is a metal cross at the spring and Epiphany is observed there, while in the 1990s Mari pagan prayers resumed as well ^[1]. The Mari come to communal prayers once a year, on September 11, and still tie ribbons to the trees and leave coins; Orthodox believers and non-believing neighbors take part too — the custom has become shared by the whole locality ^[13][10].

The grove is home to the perennial honesty (Lunaria rediviva), listed in the Red Book, on whose account the urochishche is also protected as a botanical monument ^[13]. One of the sacred springs on the Volga bank — its water was said to be as bitter as bile — has been flooded by the swollen reservoir: the water has risen almost to the roots of the sacred pine standing beside it ^[13].

The SURA Facility

One hundred forty kilometers from Nizhny Novgorod, at the Vasilsursk experimental research station of Lobachevsky University, the unique scientific installation "SURA Facility" has been operating since 1981 — the only installation in Russia for studying artificial ionospheric disturbances in the field of powerful radio waves ^[14].

The station is a fully self-contained research center: a dedicated thirty-kilometer high-voltage line runs to its electrical substation, and it has its own water pumping station and boiler house, with accommodations provided for visiting groups of specialists ^[14]. SURA's advantage over foreign counterparts — EISCAT in Tromsø, Norway, HAARP in Alaska, and Arecibo in Puerto Rico — is that its antenna array works not only for transmission but also for reception, which makes it possible to conduct radio-astronomical observations in the long-wave part of the decameter range as well ^[14].

• three PKV-250 shortwave radio transmitters with a power of 250 kW each, in the 4–25 MHz range ^[14]
• a 144-element phased antenna array measuring about 300 by 300 meters, mounted on reinforced-concrete supports 22 meters high ^[14]
• effective radiated power of 80–280 MW, powered from an 8 MW substation ^[14]
• beam scanning of ±40° in the north–south plane, with a switching time of 20 minutes ^[14]

The Reservoir and the Present Day

The Cheboksary Reservoir was created in 1980 by damming the Volga near Novocheboksarsk and in 1981 was filled to a level of 63 meters instead of the planned 68 ^[16]. The spreading water swallowed the low bank of the Volga and the riverside part of the city — the places Levitan painted no longer exist ^[12]. The filling and long-term operation of the reservoir at this level noticeably intensified exogenous geological processes, that is, landslides ^[16]; the dispute over raising the level continues to this day (Raising the Cheboksary Reservoir Level, Consequences of Raising the Cheboksary Reservoir, Myths of the Cheboksary Reservoir).

The settlement ultimately moved uphill for good: it used to lie mostly in the lowland, and now it rises above the Volga and the Sura ^[10]. The upper part began to be built up as early as the late 19th century, and it was then, in 1897, that a new cemetery opened here ^[9].

Today Vasilsursk is a work settlement in Vorotynsky urban okrug ^[1], included in the list of historic settlements of regional significance of Nizhny Novgorod Region ^[2]. About six hundred people live there, and in summer the population doubles thanks to seasonal visitors ^[11][10]. There is almost nowhere to work: a small school and kindergarten, a hospital with a general practitioner, a few shops; a large share of the residents are pensioners, and young people leave for the cities. About sixty children attend the school, which was built for five hundred ^[10].

There is movement in the opposite direction too: people from Moscow buy houses here, nearly every house has running water, sewerage, and gas, and people in creative professions stay and work remotely ^[10]. On Sundays, early in the morning, a fair opens in the center of the settlement — milk, farmer's cheese, vegetables, fruit, and smoked fish are brought in from neighboring Mari El ^[11]. Vasilsursk's five-hundredth anniversary was celebrated on August 17–19, 2023 ^[4].

What to See

The Church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God, dating from 1708, is the only church in the settlement that has survived; a long staircase leads up to it ^[12]. It was built as a monastery church: the Trinity Hermitage, later a men's monastery, stood in the sloboda of Khmelevka; the church was consecrated on September 17 by Metropolitan Tikhon of Kazan, with a side chapel in honor of St. Michael Maleinos added at the same time at the expense of Mikhail, a merchant from Cheboksary, and in 1764 the monastery was abolished and the church became a parish church ^[18]. A wrought-iron cross, as old as the church, has survived here; a second identical one was carried off in the 1980s by "antiquity lovers." Several old gravestones stand nearby ^[10].

The local history museum occupies the estate of the major timber industrialist Aleksandr Yakovlevich Chastukhin. The house, built in 1861, was one of the first in the upper part of Vasilsursk; stucco molding survives in the halls, and the second floor is a mezzanine with access to a balcony and views in all four directions. The estate grounds cover 25 sotkas (about a quarter of a hectare): an exhibition called "Fishing Trade," cherry and apple-and-pear orchards, a pond, a rose garden, and a commemorative oak planted for the 350th anniversary of Peter I's birth and the 300th anniversary of his visit ^[4].

Across from the museum, a row of Vasilsursk window frames (nalichniki) is on display, removed from abandoned houses to preserve them: they are distinguished by carving in the form of a grapevine, with a pine base and applied carved elements cut from linden and fastened on with small nails. Among the exhibits are a steam engine from the 1896 All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition, bought by the Vasilsursk merchant and shipowner Sarakeev and still in working order, and an enameled steel mug bearing the monogram of Nicholas II — one of those handed out at the coronation festivities of 1896 ^[10].

The settlement is buried in the greenery of gardens and groves. In the 1930s a park of regularly planted birches was laid out in the center — a light-toned stand with clearly marked paths; descriptions of the settlement's landscaping single out the reinforcement of slopes and the renewal of plantings that had lost their decorative quality as a particular concern. An oak grove, according to tradition planted by Peter the Great, enclosed the town along the bank of the Sura ^[6] and survives to this day; next to "Shishkin Cape" stands a monument to Peter I ^[10].

• "Eagle's Nest" — an observation platform by the settlement's 500th Anniversary Park, with a monument to Maxim Gorky ^[10][12]
• "Shishkin Cape" — a viewing platform above the confluence of the Sura and the Volga ^[10]
• "Levitan's Favorite Place" — a scenic overlook on Kalinina Street ^[10]
• The Petrovsky oak grove and the altar-tree, in whose bark people leave coins ^[10]
• The local history museum in the Chastukhin estate and the exhibit in memory of Konstantin Stepanov ^[4][10]

Coat of arms

The coat of arms of the district town of Vasil was Most Highly approved on August 16, 1781. The original description reads: "In the upper part of the shield, the coat of arms of Nizhny Novgorod. In the lower part, the base of a ship's stern, on a gold field, as a sign that the best ship-timber forests are harvested in the environs of this town" ^[17]. The stern on the coat of arms commemorates the groves protected by Peter I, the best trees of which were used for shipbuilding ^[4].

The modern coat of arms of the urban-type settlement was recreated from the historical one and approved by a decision of the settlement Council on August 26, 2016. It was entered in the State Heraldic Register of the Russian Federation under No. 11243: "In a golden field, the purple base of a stern, fastened at the crossings with black nagels" ^[17].

Tourism and getting there

Vasilsursk attracts tourists with its picturesque nature, clean air, quiet, and distance from the bustle of the city; the settlement has a rest home and several recreation centers, excursions are offered, and visitors can fish and hunt ^[8][4]. Descriptions of the settlement call it a center of recreational and sports tourism in Nizhny Novgorod Region, and the region's tourism portal names Vasilsursk as the main reason to travel to Vorotynsky District ^[12].

The journey is an adventure in itself. The ferry from Lysaya Gora takes about twenty minutes to reach Vasilsursk, and from the settlement it departs at 07:00, 09:00, 13:00, and 17:30 ^[12]. In spring and autumn, when the ferry does not run, the settlement is effectively cut off from the mainland: the detour via Cheboksary is a loop of more than two hundred kilometers, and locals do not seriously consider it; in winter the road runs over the ice ^[10]. In summer, the high-speed "Meteor" hydrofoil runs here, while by bus one gets there with transfers: Nizhny Novgorod — Vorotynets — Lysaya Gora — the ferry crossing ^[10].

Sources

1. opentextnn.ru — Open Text — an electronic periodical of the Nizhny Novgorod branch of the Russian Society of Historians and Archivists (archive)
2. opentextnn.ru — Open Text — a scholarly publication marking the 500th anniversary of the founding of the fortress — Davydov A. I. On the Location of the Vasilgorod Fortress. Historiography of the Question (archive)
3. opentextnn.ru — Open Text — a study by the historian P. V. Chechenkov — Chechenkov P. V. The Fortifications of the Nizhny Novgorod Land in the Context of the Foreign Policy of Vasily III and Elena Glinskaya (archive)
4. muzeum-vrt.ru — Vorotynsky District Museum of Local Lore — an essay on the settlement and its museum — Vasilsursk (archive)
5. MK — Nizhny Novgorod — "MK in Nizhny Novgorod" — an account of the history of Vasilsursk's landslides with the geologist B. I. Fridman — A Landslide in Vasilsursk Destroyed the Fortress, Churches, and Houses in an Instant (archive)
6. wiki.laser.ru — Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, article by A. Selivanov (copy in the web archive) — Vasilsursk
7. web.archive.org — Kudryavtsev V. F. A Historical Description of the Town of Vasil in Nizhny Novgorod Governorate, 1877 (publication on the Vasilsursk website, copy in the web archive) — History of Vasilsursk. Chapter 1 (archive)
8. web.archive.org — Website of Vasilsursk by A. V. Golyakov (copy in the web archive) (archive)
9. sobory.ru — People's Catalog of Orthodox Architecture — history of Vasilsursk's churches — Vasilsursk, Cathedral of the Protection of the Most Holy Mother of God (archive)
10. NN.RU — a report from Vasilsursk, July 2026 — "Volga Switzerland" and Even Better: How the Most Cultured Settlement in Nizhny Novgorod Region Lives (archive)
11. lgz.ru — Literaturnaya Gazeta — an essay by the film director Vyacheslav Khotulyov, September 2026 — My Love Is Vasilsursk (archive)
12. nn-tourist.ru — Tourist portal of Nizhny Novgorod Region — Vorotynets (archive)
13. komanda-k.ru — "Mari Forest Walkers" — passports of Mari natural monuments and notes by N. V. Morokhin — Sacred Mari Places in the Vicinity of Vasilsursk (archive)
14. nirfi.unn.ru — Radiophysical Research Institute of Nizhny Novgorod State University — description of the facility — Brief Description of the Unique Scientific Facility SURA Test Bed (archive)
15. tg-m.ru — Tretyakov Gallery magazine — a chronicle of the artist's life and work — Chronicle of the Life and Work of Isaac Levitan (archive)
16. Dront Ecocenter — Dront Ecological Center, Nizhny Novgorod — materials on the Cheboksary Reservoir — On the Problem of the Cheboksary Hydroelectric Station (archive)
17. geraldika.ru — Geraldika.ru — description of the historical and modern coats of arms — Coat of Arms of the Municipal Entity of the Urban-Type Settlement of Vasilsursk (archive)
18. web.archive.org — Kudryavtsev V. F. on the Khmelevo church and the Trinity Hermitage (publication on the Vasilsursk website, copy in the web archive) — History of Vasilsursk. The Khmelevo Church (archive)