Curated playlist
World Heritage Sites in Russia
- Kamchatka PeninsulaThe Kamchatka Peninsula stretches 1,250 kilometers into the Pacific from Russia's far eastern edge, a finger of land so remote that it remained closed to foreigners until 1990. Wedged between the Sea of Okhotsk to the west and the Bering…
- Peterhof PalacePeterhof Palace sits at the edge of the Gulf of Finland, its fountains firing without a single pump. Peter the Great built this place not merely as a home but as a statement directed at a specific monarch: Louis XIV of France. What began…
- 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 the capital of Russia. Not Moscow, not Saint Petersburg -- a trading city on the…
- Kazan KremlinThe Kazan Kremlin sits at the heart of Kazan, Russia, built by order of Ivan the Terrible on the rubble of a Tatar khanate's castle. That founding act alone contains a story of conquest, erasure, and rebuilding that never really ended.…
- Saint PetersburgSaint Petersburg sits at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea, and on the 27th of May 1703, Tsar Peter the Great laid its founding stone on an island he had just wrested from Sweden. He named the city after the apostle Saint…
- Altai MountainsThe Altai Mountains sit at the point where Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan all meet, a convergence zone that has drawn humans, animals, and entire civilizations for tens of thousands of years. At the heart of the range stands…
- Red SquareRed Square stands at the eastern wall of the Kremlin in the heart of Moscow, a space almost 73,000 square metres in size that has witnessed executions, coronations, riots, military triumphs, and rock concerts. Its name is not what it…
- Trinity Lavra of St. SergiusIn May 1923, peasants and soldiers filled the halls of the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius to hear something new. A band from the Moscow cavalry played Stenka Razin over the radio. A lecturer followed, explaining the benefits of chemical…
- 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. This city on the Klyazma River sits 200 kilometers east of Moscow. It once ruled its own…
- Lake BaikalLake Baikal holds roughly 22 to 23 percent of all the fresh surface water on Earth. That single fact stops most people in their tracks, because the lake sits quietly in southern Siberia, known mainly as a cold, remote body of water that…
- Saint Basil's CathedralSaint Basil's Cathedral stands at the southern end of Red Square in Moscow, and it looks like nothing else on earth. Russian historian Dmitry Shvidkovsky wrote that "nothing similar can be found in the entire millennium of Byzantine…
- Wrangel IslandWrangel Island sits astride the 180th meridian in the Arctic Ocean, a remote Russian territory so geographically peculiar that the International Date Line bends around it rather than cutting through it. The island is roughly the size of…