Kaliazin

Kaliazin 

a city and administrative center of Kaliazin Raion, Kalinin Oblast, RSFSR.

Kaliazin has a dock on the right bank of the Volga River and a railroad station on the Moscow-Sonkovo-Leningrad line. There is also a 47-km branch line from Kaliazin to Uglich. Kaliazin arose in the 12th century as a sloboda (tax-exempt settlement); its importance increased with the founding in the 15th century of the Kaliazin-Troitskii (Makar’evskii) Monastery on the opposite bank. The sloboda was declared the district city of Kaliazin in 1775.

There are felt-footwear, clothing, and shoe factories in Kalia-zin, as well as a vegetable-dehydrating plant and a flax-process-ing plant. There is also a machine-building technicum. Amuseum of local lore contains architectural, ceramic, and sculp-tural fragments and murals from the Kaliazin-Troitskii monas-tery and applied art from the 18th and 19th centuries. Part of the old city was flooded with the construction of the UglichHydroelectric Power Plant; the monastery (a group of buildingsfrom the 16th and 17th centuries) and certain other old struc-tures are now in the reservoir zone. Buildings that were pre-served include the bell tower of the Nikola Cathedral (1800), thegroup of buildings of the Voznesenskii Church, and houses dat-ing from the 18th and 19th centuries.