Curated category
Rus' towns
- LvivLviv is Ukraine's fifth-largest city, but its history stretches far longer and stranger than that ranking suggests. Founded in 1250 by King Daniel of Galicia…
- Nizhny NovgorodNizhny Novgorod sits at the precise point where two of Russia's greatest rivers, the Volga and the Oka, merge into one. On the 4th of February 1221, Prince…
- YaroslavlYaroslavl sits at the point where the Volga and Kotorosl rivers meet, 250 kilometers northeast of Moscow, and for a few extraordinary months in 1612, it was…
- MuromIn the 9th century AD, a settlement marked the easternmost point of East Slav presence in the land of the Finnic Muromians.
- KurskKursk sits where three rivers meet: the Kur, the Tuskar, and the Seym. It is one of the oldest cities in Russia, recorded in written history as far back as…
- PolotskPolotsk sits on the Dvina River in what is now Belarus, and it has been there, in one form or another, since before the year 862.
- BarysawThe Laurentian Codex records the year 1102 as the moment Barysaw first appeared in written history. Prince Rogvolod Vseslavich of Polotsk established this…
- SuzdalSuzdal is a small town in Russia's Vladimir Oblast, and in 1943 it held some of the highest-ranking prisoners of the Second World War.
- MoscowMoscow holds the second-highest number of billionaires of any city in the world, tied with Hong Kong. It stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, the…
- SmolenskSmolensk sits on the Dnieper River, 360 kilometers west-southwest of Moscow, and for more than a thousand years it has stood at the hinge between…
- Vladimir, RussiaVladimir, Russia, still has buildings standing from the 12th century, stonework old enough to have watched Kiev's power fade and Moscow's rise begin.
- KyivKyiv has stood on the banks of the Dnieper River for at least fifteen centuries, and during that time it has been sacked, burned, rebuilt, conquered, and…