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# Photographs taken by Maxim Dmitriev in the 1900s near the source of the Volga
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/snimki-sdelannye-maksimom-dmitrievym-v-1900-e-gody-nedaleko-ot-istoka-volgi/
- Published: 2026-03-06T05:32:57.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:26:44.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Geography, Maps, Science, Nature

The officially recognised source of the Volga is a marshy area on the Valdai Hills in the Tver Region, near the village of Volgoverkhovye. It is a small spring at an altitude of about 228 metres above sea level.

From a scientific point of view, the notion of a "source" is usually conventional where great rivers are concerned. Hydrologists apply different criteria: greatest length, greatest water discharge, greatest catchment area. Taking these parameters together, Volgoverkhovye has been accepted as a conventional but stable geographical point of reference.

The Primary Chronicle (*Povest vremennykh let*) of the early twelfth century contains a famous passage:

> From that same forest flows the Volga to the east, and falls by seventy mouths into the Khvalis Sea.

The chronicler places the sources of the Volga, the Dnieper and the Dvina in one and the same "forest", on the Valdai, which is remarkably accurate for its time, though mythologised. It is one of the earliest written testimonies linking the source of the Volga specifically with the Valdai Hills.

The cartographers of Renaissance Europe, Gerardus Mercator and Sigismund von Herberstein among them, placed the Volga on their maps on the strength of hearsay. Herberstein described the Volga in some detail in his *Notes on Muscovy*, but was inexact about its source, locating it nearer the lakes of the north-west. The first Russian "drawings" appeared under Ivan the Terrible, yet no systematic hydrographic survey yet existed.

Genuine scientific study of the source and basin of the Volga began under Peter I, when geographical expeditions took on a state character. The Academy expeditions of 1768 to 1774, led by Peter Pallas, Ivan Lepyokhin and Samuel Gmelin, covered vast territories of the Volga region. In his *Daily Notes of a Journey*, Lepyokhin described the upper Volga and the marshy character of the land around the source, giving it for the first time a more or less accurate scientific characterisation. By the end of the eighteenth century the position of the source on the Valdai Hills had been fixed in Russian scientific literature as generally accepted.

In the nineteenth century the question of the source of the Volga unexpectedly became a matter of dispute. Some geographers proposed that the source should be reckoned not as the spring at Volgoverkhovye but as larger bodies of water in the upper Volga system, for example Lake Sterzh, into which the young river flows after only a few dozen kilometres. The Russian Geographical Society, founded in 1845, busied itself with systematising these data. In the end the prevailing principle was that the source is the most distant point at which a watercourse begins, and not the first large body of water on the river's path, which secured official status for the spring at Volgoverkhovye.

An important part was played by the work of the hydrographer and geographer Andrey Tillo, who at the end of the nineteenth century produced exact hypsometric maps of European Russia. It was his measurements of the heights of the Valdai Hills and of the watershed that finally confirmed the hydrological logic of the source.

In the Soviet period the Volga became the object of large-scale hydrological study, above all in connection with the building of the cascade of reservoirs in the 1930s to 1950s. The Volga-Kama cascade of eight hydroelectric stations radically altered the river's hydrological regime, but the source itself was untouched: the upper reaches above the Rybinsk Reservoir remained in their natural state. The State Water Cadastre of the USSR recorded the source of the Volga at Volgoverkhovye with exact coordinates. In parallel, research was conducted on the catchment balance, the feeding of the river and the role of the Valdai Hills as the chief watershed of European Russia.

Today the source of the Volga is under threat, and this has itself become a subject of scientific study. In dry years the spring at Volgoverkhovye dries up or grows sharply shallower. Research of recent decades records changes in the feeding of the raised bogs of the Valdai, owing both to climate change and to drainage land improvement in Soviet times. The work of the Water Problems Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and of the Valdai branch of the State Hydrological Institute shows that the water content of the upper Volga underwent considerable fluctuations over the twentieth century, and the bet is now placed on restoring the raised bogs as natural regulators of runoff.

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_19962@06-03-2026_08-32-57.jpg)

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_19963@06-03-2026_08-32-57.jpg)