Uglich was first documented in 1148 as Ugliche Pole -- Corner Field -- a name that described the sharp bend in the Volga nearby. From 1218 to 1328 it served as the seat of a small princedom before the local rulers sold their rights to the Grand Prince of Moscow. As a border town, Uglich burned repeatedly in conflicts with Lithuanians, Tatars, and the rival princes of Tver. In 1462, Grand Duke Ivan III gave the town to his younger brother Andrey Bolshoy, who expanded it and built Uglich's first stone buildings. The red-brick princely palace he completed in 1481 still stands -- one of the oldest surviving secular buildings in Russia. During Ivan the Terrible's reign, the town's inhabitants contributed to the siege of Kazan in 1552 by building a wooden fortress that was floated down the Volga to the battlefield.

After Ivan the Terrible's death, his youngest son Dmitry was banished to Uglich in 1584, effectively exiled from Moscow under the watchful eye of Boris Godunov, the tsar's chief advisor. Suspicion fell on Godunov immediately when the boy was found dead. Official investigators ruled the death an accident -- an epileptic seizure during which the boy fell on a knife. Few believed it. The authorities punished the town for ringing the alarm bell: they cut out the bell's clapper, its "tongue," and exiled the bell itself to Siberia, as if metal could be guilty of treason. Because Dmitry was the last of the Rurik line, his death opened a vacuum that destabilized all of Russia. Pretenders claiming to be the miraculously surviving Dmitry appeared one after another -- False Dmitry I, False Dmitry II, False Dmitry III -- each backed by foreign powers eager to exploit the chaos.

The period known as the Time of Troubles devastated Uglich along with much of Russia. Polish forces besieged the Alexeievsky and Uleima monasteries and burned them to the ground, killing everyone who had sought shelter inside. When the Romanov dynasty finally restored order, they moved quickly to canonize the murdered Tsarevich and designate Uglich as a place of pilgrimage. In 1692, the city built the Church of St. Demetrios on the Blood on the spot where Dmitry was thought to have died. Its crimson walls and blue domes are visible from the Volga, a landmark for travelers heading north on the river. The palace where the prince had lived was converted into a museum, and the image of the young Tsarevich with knife in hand became the town's official emblem.

Uglich's architecture tells its layered story. The Assumption Church of the Alexeyevsky Monastery, built in 1628, earned the nickname "Marvelous" from ordinary people who saw it -- and that qualifier became part of its official name. The Resurrection Monastery presents its cathedral, refectory, belfry, and summer church all in a row, dating to the 1670s. Opposite stands the Church of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, built by a merchant in 1689-90 to mark the spot where his son had drowned. In the 20th century, Stalin's industrialization reached Uglich in the form of a hydroelectric dam on the Volga. The resulting Uglich Reservoir flooded the town's outskirts, drowning the Intercession Monastery and other structures. A watch factory making Chaika timepieces operated for decades before closing. Today Uglich sits on Russia's Golden Ring tourist circuit, a small town with a violent past and architecture that ranges from medieval brick to Soviet concrete, all of it anchored by the bend in the river that gave the place its name.