Kozelsk
 |
Kozelsk's Coat of Arms |
Kozelsk, also spelled
Kozielsk () 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.
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 had to defend the town against the army of
Batu Khan. The latter dubbed it an "evil town" due to the fact that 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.
*
Upper Oka Principalities
