History Cossacks founded an ostrog in 1638, southwest of the modern town. The ostrog's name "Verkhoyansky", roughly translating from Russian as [thing/ostrog] on the Upper Yana (grammatically, it's only a masculine adjective), derived from its geographical location on the upper reaches of the Yana River. In 1775, it was moved to the left bank of the Yana River to facilitate tax collection. It was granted town status in 1817. Between the 1860s and 1917, the town was a place of political exile, with some of the more prominent exiles including the Polish writer Wacław Sieroszewski, as well as Bolshevik revolutionaries Ivan Babushkin and Viktor Nogin.
History Cossacks founded an ostrog in 1638, southwest of the modern town. The ostrog's name "Verkhoyansky", roughly translating from Russian as [thing/ostrog] on the Upper Yana (grammatically, it's only a masculine adjective), derived from its geographical location on the upper reaches of the Yana River. In 1775, it was moved to the left bank of the Yana River to facilitate tax collection. It was granted town status in 1817. Between the 1860s and 1917, the town was a place of political exile, with some of the more prominent exiles including the Polish writer Wacław Sieroszewski, as well as Bolshevik revolutionaries Ivan Babushkin and Viktor Nogin.