On 17 September 1650, voivode Vasily Petrovich Golovin laid the foundation for the third Belgorod Fortress on the left bank of the Vezenitsa River, which flows into the Seversky Donets.

[20] In the fall of 1650, a wooden fort with 11 towers was attached to the rampart of the Belgorod line, which runs from the fortress town Bolkhovets to the mouth of the Vezelka River in the area of the former brewery.

According to the plan, it was supposed to divide the entire city into 16 quarters, 4 of which should be built up with stone houses, and the rest with wooden and huts.

The plan was executed formally without taking into account the buildings that survived the fire, the Kremlin fortress and the terrain.

It provided for a trading area, which in the west adjoined the fortress Kremlin, and in the east ended with stone benches of the Gostiny dvor in the form of two arcs.

[citation needed] Travel notes which were published in 1781 showed the location of a sketch of the ramparts of the lost ancient settlement.

Only in the middle of the 1950s, the archaeologist Arkady Nikitin carried out excavations at the site of the first fortress, where the remains of ancient ramparts and ditches were still clearly visible.

[24] though the fortress itself was destroyed already in the 1860s during the construction of the railway the eastern part of the chalk mountain, on which the Kremlin was located, was collapsed.

The plans described above give a distorted position of church estates, which were fixed when the city was laid and, as a rule, did not change.

Records first mention the settlement in 1237, when the Mongol-led army of Batu Khan ravaged it during the Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus'.

In 1596 Tsar Feodor Ioannovich of Russia ordered its re-establishment as one of numerous forts set up to defend Russian southern borders from the Crimean Tatars.

[2] Belgorod was part of a chain of fortification lines, created by Grand Duchy of Moscow and later the Tsardom of Russia to protect it from the Crimean–Nogai slave raids that ravaged the southern provinces of the country during the Russo-Crimean Wars.

[31] The tsar appointed two princes-governors to supervise the construction of Belgorod: Mikhail Vasilyevich Nozdrovaty and Andrei Romanovich Volkonsky.

The first Belgorod fortress stood for sixteen years, withstanding several major attacks, both from the Tatars and from the Polish–Lithuanian troops who participated in the wars with the Russian state during the Time of Troubles.

The governor, Nikita Likharev, by order of the tsar, was already building the second Belgorod fortress on the opposite bank of the Seversky Donets the following year, 1613.

From that moment on, the city plunged into the measured provincial life of the central black earth zone of Russia.

From 24 December 1918 to 7 January 1919, the Provisional Workers' and Peasants' Government of Ukraine, then led by General Georgy Pyatakov, was based in Belgorod.

Belgorod Drama Theater is named after the famous 19th-century actor Mikhail Shchepkin, who was born in this region.

[35] On 1 April 2022, two Ukrainian Mi-24 performed a night raid and set fire to a fuel depot in Belgorod, in a low-altitude airstrike.

[36][37] On 20 April 2023, a Russian Su-34 fighter jet accidentally dropped a bomb on the city, leaving a crater 20 metres (66 ft) across and injuring two people.

[41] In March 2024, authorities began evacuating 9,000 children from the city and wider region due to shelling and drone attacks.

The officially cited reason for the closure was inadequate condition of the overhead contact lines and insufficient funds for its modernization.