Kazhym Settlement

Kazhym stands on the river of the same name thirty kilometres from Koygorodok — a typical mining settlement of which the Urals have dozens, but here, in the heart of forested Komi, it is a rarity. The story began in 1755, when the manufacturer Ivan Kurochkin received permission from the Berg Collegium to build an ironworks; the plant started two years later. Workers were brought as serfs from the Vyatka and Veliky Ustyug provinces, with local Komi peasants in auxiliary roles. The settlement remembers a rebellion: in 1773 peasants destroyed the factory in response to debt bondage. The stone Church of Demetrius of Thessaloniki, built in 1817–1826, still stands — together with the former factory office it is the main evidence of Kazhym's 'cast-iron era'. The plant worked intermittently, was nationalised in 1918 and finally mothballed in 1928. About a thousand people live in Kazhym today. The Syktyvkar–Kudymkar road passes through the settlement, described in local sources as unpaved and 'not popular' — yet it is exactly this inaccessibility that preserved the atmosphere of a living museum of Ural industrialisation, forgotten in the Komi forests.