Yekaterinburg Tourist Information

The city of Yekaterinburg is an industrial and mining center, which straddles the Iset River near its source in the eastern foothills of the Ural Mountains. Peter the Great founded the city in 1723 as a factory-fort and steel manufacturing town and named it after St. Catherine in indirect honor of his wife, Catherine. Peter the Great planned the city as a push to exploit the Ural region’s mineral riches. The discovery of gold in 1745 and veins of other precious metals and stones in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made the area a center of Russian mining and stone exploitation. By the 19th century Yekaterinburg had developed into an engineering centre supplying the Ural region’s mines with machinery.

The city witnessed the death of monarchy in Russia, where the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II with his family was assassinated in the Ipatiev house by the Bolsheviks in July 16, 1918. In 1924, Yekaterinburg was renamed Sverdlovsk in honor of Yakov Sverdlov, a leading Bolshevik of the time.

During World War II, the city's position behind the front lines of enemy advance allowed it to became a leading producer of war material and an evacuation center for the civilian population of Western Russia. Yekaterinburg's rich mix of cultural offerings is a legacy of the wartime evacuation of the artistic elite to this region.

The Soviet Union closed the city to foreigners throughout much of the post-war period and it was only reopened in December 1991. This was also the year when Yekaterinburg took back its original name. Today Yekaterinburg's foreign contacts and foreign population are growing rapidly as American, European and Asian businesses and tourist flows to the Urals region are gradually increasing. It’s a rather interesting place to visit – especially to geologists and industrial archeologists.

Yekaterinburg is Russia's fourth largest city with a population of 1.5 million.

A tourist visiting Yekaterinburg should stay there for a few days to get a closer look at historical monuments, and to appreciate picturesque environs whose nature boasts a great diversity and riches.

The present day Yekaterinburg is rich in sights - architectural monuments of Russian classicism of the 18-19th centuries including the estate of Rastorguev-Kharitonov; the house of the mining chief: the Mining Board; the Church of' Alexander Nevsky, the Church of Ascension and others; the Geological Museum featuring a unique collection of minerals; the Fine Arts Museum which, along with a rich collection of paintings by Russian and foreign artists, displays Kasly castings; Museums of Ural Writers such as Mamin-Sibiriak and Bazhov.

The Fine Arts Museum has unusual sections devoted to cast-iron art, precious stone cutting, and the local craft of engraving or painting trays, known as Uralskye podnosy.

The wooden houses that were inhabited by the city intelligentsia in the 19th century are now "the Literary District" where the Museum of Ural Writers and its branches are located.

© by Russia-IC

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