The first known written mention of the
domra is in
Admonitions of Metropolitan Daniel (1530). This musical instrument gained great popularity in the 16th–17th centuries, replacing the
gusli. There are numerous mentions of the
domra in historic documents of this period. For instance,
Alphabet (1654), in the Moscow Synodal Library, says: "As to what
musikiia is:
Musikiia, playing, that is, the sounding of
gusli and
kiniry, or lyres, and
domry, and similar things". In addition, medieval Russian
illuminated manuscripts of the
Psalter contain images of musicians with necked
plucked-string instruments, and some of those
miniatures are clearly captioned "
depiction of domras". Judging by those images, late medieval Russian
domry can be divided into two types: lute-shaped, which had five to six strings, a large body and а
pegbox angled back, and tanbur-shaped, which had three to four strings, a small body and a straight pegbox. After the pious Tsar
Alexis of Russia issued an edict ordering the persecution of
Russian folk musicians and destruction of their instruments (1648), the
domra gradually came into disuse and was replaced by the
balalaika, which was much easier to make and play. According to the edict: In 1896, a student of
Vasily Vasilievich Andreyev found a broken instrument in a stable in rural Russia. It was thought that this instrument may have been an example of a
domra, although at that time no illustrations or examples of the traditional
domra were known to exist (the traditional
domra was only known through numerous mentions in folklore, though examples existed of the
dombra, a related
Turkic instrument). A three-stringed version of this instrument was later redesigned in 1896, patented, and introduced into the orchestra of Russian folk instruments. ==Orchestral instruments==