Kozelsk

Kozelsk ( _ru. Козе́льск) is a town in Kaluga Oblast, Russia, located on the Zhizdra River (Oka's tributary), 72 km southwest of Kaluga. As of 2002 Census, the town had population of 19,907.

History

The town of Kozelsk was first mentioned in a chronicle under the year of 1146 as a part of Principality of Chernigov. Kozelsk became famous in the spring of 1238, when its seven-year-old prince Vasily, son of Titus, had to defend the town against the army of Batu Khan. The latter dubbed it an "evil town" because its citizens had been fighting the attackers for seven weeks in a row, killing around 4,000 enemy soldiers during the siege. The cititenzs of Kozelsk were greatly outnumbered and almost all of them died in battle.

In 1446, Kozelsk was temporarily under the rule of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In 1494, the town was finally annexed by the Muscovy. In 1607, one of Ivan Bolotnikov's units was located in Kozelsk and showed resistance to the tsarist army.

The much-venerated monastery, Optina Pustyn, is close by. Inthe 19th century, this hermitage gained wide renown for its "startsy". After the outbreak of World War II a POW camp was established in the monastery for Polish officers taken captive by the Red Army during the Polish Defensive War of 1939. Between April and May of 1940, the NKVD transferred approximately 4,500 of them to a forest near Katyn, where they were executed in what became known as the Katyn massacre. The remaining 200 officers were sent to a camp in Pavlishchev Bor and then to Gryazovets. The town was occupied by the German army from October of 1941 until December 27, 1941 and totally destroyed. Kozelsk was rebuilt after the war.

ee also

*Upper Oka Principalities