The settlement of Pilna

Hello!

We are the 9th form students of municipal state-financed educational institution «Pilna secondary school №2 named after A.S. Pushkin».

Its website is https://piln2.nnovschool.ru 

At school we study English as the first foreign language and German as the second foreign language.

The name of our team is «The Magnificent Five».

Our team motto is «To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield».

Team members are Egor Obukhov, Arina Tsapina, Polina Lukoyanova, Arina Galaktionova, Daniil Dolgov.

Team leader is Sergey Gennadyevich Smirnov.

We are from the settlement of Pilna. It is situated in the southeast of Nizhny Novgorod region. Its geographical coordinates are 55° 33' N, 45° 55' E (picture 1).

The settlement of Pilna was established in 1698 by decree of Peter the Great as a «settlement around the first state sawmills on the banks of the Pyana river that provided wood for construction of the incipient Russian Navy» (picture 2). The settlement derives its name from sawing machines. Its first dwellers were the exiled that sawed oak timber, which was floated for the Kazan Admiralty. Pilna was recorded as Sawing Factory in cadastral books during the reign of Catherine II.

The Saw Museum was opened in the settlement of Pilna in 2010. The exhibits in the museum include not only a collection of saws of all kinds, but other woodworking tools as well (picture 3).

The Trans-Siberian Railway passes through the railway station in Pilna. The building of the railway station was built according to the project of A. V. Shchusev in 1918 (picture 5).

The main sights of our settlement are the Church of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker (picture 6), the Saint spring «Nifontov Kolodchik» (picture 7), the Memorial of Glory and the Alley of Heroes (picture 8).

The settlement of Pilna is located on the left bank of the Pyana River.

The Pyana translates from Russian into drunken. The original name of the river was likely Piana and might be of Uralic origin («pieni» means «small»). The most likely reason for the transformation of Piana to Pyana was the Battle on Pyana River. The battle was fought on 2 August 1377 between the Khan Arapsha and joint Russian troops under Knyaz Ivan Dmitriyevich. Awaiting the battle, the Russian Army lost discipline with drunkenness being a norm. They were unexpectedly attacked from all sides and crushed by the Mongols, forcing retreat to and across the Pyana. Many soldiers, and the Knyaz himself, drowned while crossing it. This explanation is further supported by the original text of the chronicles of the battle, where the writer first calls the river Piana, then notes the ironical similarity of the words piana and pyana and further uses Pyana as the river name (picture 9).

The Pyana fully corresponds to its name. Its length is 436 km, and the mouth from the source is located only 30 km away. The pattern of its flow is very winding, reminiscent of the foot of a drunken man. Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov (Andrey Pechersky) described the Pyana as follows: «Even the first Russian inhabitants called the Drunken River for the fact that it staggers, it dangles in all directions, exactly a drunken woman, and, having traveled five hundred miles in twists and turns, runs up to its source and almost near it pours into the Sura» (picture 10).

There is an outcrop on the left slope of the valley of the Pyana near the settlement of Pilna (picture 11). Many fossils can be found in the rocks that make up our outcrop, which allow us to judge the history of the development of our region in the past. In clays that are 150 million years old, ammonite cephalopod shells (picture 12) and belemnite rostra (picture 13) have been found.

Our Pilna district is a multicultural district. Folk arts, beliefs, customs and habits of four nations coexist here. They are the Russians (74%), the Tatars (16%), the Mordvins (6%) and the Chuvash (3%) (picture 14).