Concept

Petrozavodsk

Summary
Petrozavodsk (Петрозаводск; Karelian, Vepsian and Petroskoi) is the capital city of the Republic of Karelia, Russia, which stretches along the western shore of Lake Onega for some . The population of the city is 280,890 as of 2022. The name of the city is a combination of words Peter (Peter the Great) and zavod (meaning factory). It was previously known as Shuysky Zavod (1703–1704) and Petrovskaya Sloboda (1704–1777), which was the first name of the city related to Peter the Great. It was renamed to Petrozavodsk after Catherine the Great granted the settlement the status of a city. An ancient Swedish name was Onegaborg, known from a map from 1592 of the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius, and hence translated to Finnish as Äänislinna, a name used during the occupation of Eastern Karelia by Finnish forces during the Continuation War (1941–1944) in the context of World War II. Archeological discoveries in the urban area indicate the presence of a settlement as far back as seven thousand years ago, and during the Middle Ages the site of modern city was marked by several lakeside villages. Within the city limits, the district of Solomennoje appears in surviving records dating back to the sixteenth century, and a map produced by the Flemish cartographer Abraham Ortelius at the end of that century places a settlement here called Onegaborg on the site of modern Petrozavodsk. On 11 September 1703, Prince Menshikov founded the settlement of Petrovskaya Sloboda ("Petrine Sloboda"). He did so at the behest of Tsar Peter the Great, who needed a new iron foundry to manufacture cannons and anchors for the Baltic Fleet at the time of the Great Northern War (1700–1721). At first the foundry used the name Shuysky zavod (literally, "factory at the Shuya River"), but a decade later it became Petrovsky zavod ("Petrine factory"), after the name of the reigning monarch. From this form the present name of the city derives. By 1717, Petrovskaya Sloboda had grown into the largest settlement in Karelia, with about 3,500 inhabitants, a timber fort, a covered market, and miniature palaces of the Tsar and Menshikov.
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