Dalnee Konstantinovo - a workers' settlement and the administrative center of Dalnekonstantinovsky District in the Nizhny Novgorod Region.
Located 70 km from Nizhny Novgorod.
History of the settlement
Prominent Nizhny Novgorod researchers Kiryanov Igor Aleksandrovich and N.F. Filatov maintain that the origins of Dalnee Konstantinovo date back to the reign (1341–1355) of Konstantin Vasilyevich, the founder of the Nizhny Novgorod Grand Principality. This suggests that Dalnee Konstantinovo may be one of the oldest Russian settlements on the territory of the Nizhny Novgorod Region. It arose as a "distant" (Dalnee) possession of Prince Konstantin Vasilyevich, far from Nizhny Novgorod. The principal occupation of its inhabitants was farming. By the 16th century, Konstantinovo was already a selo (a larger village) with a fairly sizeable population for its time, and a wooden church dedicated to St. Nicholas is mentioned at the beginning of the 17th century. The ancient wooden church was replaced in 1827 by a stone one, also dedicated to St. Nicholas; this stone church was closed in 1930 and subsequently demolished. However, in the 1990s it reopened in the settlement of Dalnee Konstantinovo. Construction of a new St. Nicholas church building is currently under way. In 1705, the village was granted by Tsar Peter I (Alekseyevich) as a hereditary estate to the state official Semyon Lyubovnikov for his service, as the charter states, and for the eternal peace with the King of Poland. A century and a half ago the settlement consisted of a single street — that is, two rows of houses. The southwestern part of the village served as a marketplace. Saturday bazaars bustled on this square in Dalnee Konstantinovo. Merchants came to the bazaar from other districts and towns. The bazaar was renowned for its horses, which buyers came to purchase from Mordovia, Chuvashia, and Tatarstan. The fame of Dalnee Konstantinovo was also enhanced by the highway passing through the village that connected the city of Kazan with the city of Moscow. Along this road, peasants hauled provisions to their masters in Moscow. In 1903, Dr. M.V. Vladimirsky worked here as a physician — he later became a Soviet party and state figure and People's Commissar of Health of the RSFSR. In 1975, a new complex of district hospital buildings was constructed. Since 1930, the district newspaper Rodnaya Zemlya ("Native Land") has been published in Dalnee Konstantinovo. In 1977, the village of Dalnee Konstantinovo was granted the status of a workers' settlement.