Sudislavl is a small ancient urban settlement, the regional center of the Kostroma Region. The settlement is included into the List of historical ancient cities of Russia.

The population of Sudislavl is 5 thousand people (2010).

The settlement is one of the leading manufacturers and suppliers of furs in the fur market of Russia. The settlement also has a logging enterprise, timber enterprise, linen factory, and a dairy industrial complex. One can visit Sudislavl Museum of Local Lore. Sudislavl is decorated with the Saviour Transfiguration Cathedral standing on a high hill, on the bank of River Cobra from 1758.

History of Sudislavl:

Sudislavl is first time recorded in the annals of the Soligalich Voskresensky Monastery of 1360 as a stockade town, however it is beyond doubts that the city existed already in the 11th century. The origin of the town’s name is associated with Prince Sudislav Vladimirovich, who most probably founded the city in the first half of the 11th century as a fortress at the northern frontier of the Kiev Rus’.

In 1572 Ivan the Terrible legated Sudislavl to his son Feodor.

Sudislavl had a wooden kremlin surrounded with a shaft and a ditch. Impassable bogs were all around it. In 1613 Mikhail Romanov when a claimant to the tsarist throne took cover from enemies there.

Throughout the 17th-18th centuries Sudislavl gradually lost its strategic value and turned into a trading merchant city.

Weaving, tanning, joinery, pottery and other crafts developed in the town. Sudislavl was also known as one of the trading centers of linen and leather in the north of Russia, and a place extremely rich in mushrooms. In late summer a considerable part of the town’s population and neighboring villages went to the woods for picking mushrooms, which were then sold at special “mushroom fairs” to secondhand dealers from St. Petersburg, Moscow and other big cities.

In the 18th-19th centuries Sudislavl was one of the large centers of Old Believers.

From 1719 it was an appanage town, and from 1778 – an out-of-the-way town of the Kostroma District of Kostroma Province. In the 18th century a number of manors of noble families were constructed in vicinities of town, and some of them have remained till now.

In the 20th century Sudislavl lost its status of a town and was considered a rural settlement after 1925.

Sudislavl has been the regional center of Sudislavl District since 1929 and an urban settlement since 1963.