Yaroslavl

• 1. Introduction

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  Yaroslavl 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 Volga's bank, running a nation under siege. That fact alone tells you something about Yaroslavl's place in history. It is among the oldest cities in Russia, a member of the Golden Ring, and its historic center is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its 2021 population stood at 577,279. But numbers and honors only go so far. The deeper story of Yaroslavl is one of fire, invasion, ice, and survival -- a city that was nearly destroyed more times than most cities are even seriously threatened. How did a settlement on a river bend become Russia's second-largest city in the 17th century? And how does a place hold onto its past while rebuilding itself, again and again, from ash?

• 2. The Viking Crossroads

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  Long before Yaroslav the Wise gave the city his name, the ground beneath it was already ancient. The oldest settlement traces found on the left bank of the Volga date back to somewhere between the 5th and 3rd millennium BCE. By the 9th century, a large Scandinavian-Slavic community called Timerevo had formed nearby, and the artifacts excavated there read like a catalog of the early medieval world: Scandinavian weapons bearing runic inscriptions, chess pieces, and the largest collection of Arabian coins found anywhere in northern Europe. The earliest of those coins were struck during the first Idrisid dynasty. Timerevo also yielded the fourth set of Scandinavian brooches ever uncovered in Russia. All of this points to a settlement that was a major hub on the Volga trade route, connecting the Norse world to the orient by river. When that trade route eventually closed, Timerevo faded -- probably not long after the city of Yaroslavl itself was founded. The connection between the two settlements' fates was almost certainly direct. Upstream, archaeologists have also studied a large necropolis dominated by Finno-Ugric-style graves, adding yet another layer to the ethnic complexity of this stretch of the Volga.

• 3. Founded on a Riverbank

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  Yaroslav the Wise founded the city that bears his name during his rule over the Principality of Rostov, which ran from 988 to 1010. The site he chose was a promontory called Strelka, where the steep banks of the Volga, Kotorosl, and Medveditsa rivers met. The natural defenses were clear: high cliffs on multiple sides, a narrow approach. There, Yaroslav and his men built the first Yaroslavl Kremlin. The first recorded event in the city's history was grim -- a famine-driven revolt known as the Rostov Uprising of 1071. By the 12th century, two monasteries -- the Petropavlovsky and the Spaso-Preobrazhensky -- had already been established well outside the city's walls; the city would eventually grow around them. In 1218, the ruler Konstantin divided his lands among his sons just before his death, and the Yaroslav lands passed to his second son Vsevolod. That transfer created the Principality of Yaroslavl, which operated independently for more than two centuries before being absorbed into the Grand Duchy of Moscow in 1463. A mass grave found during a 2005 excavation contained the remains of at least 300 people killed during a Mongol invasion in 1238 -- a measure of the violence that shaped the city's early centuries.

• 4. Fire, Stone, and Survival

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  For much of its early life, Yaroslavl was a city built of wood, and wood burns. Fires came so often and burned so thoroughly that the city was sometimes nearly wiped from the map. The blaze of 1221 struck just before Vsevolod took power. The Mongol attack of 1257 under Möngke Khan killed both the general population and the prince's close family. A memorial church and cross now stand on the right bank of the Kotorosl at that site. Plagues struck in 1278 and again in 1364. Further Golden Horde attacks came in 1293 and 1322. Each time, the city rebuilt. The abandonment of wooden construction in the 16th century was a direct response to this cycle. The Spaso-Preobrazhensky Monastery was destroyed in 1501 and rebuilt quickly; its cathedral, completed between 1506 and 1516, became the oldest unchanged building in Yaroslavl. By mid-century, the monastery had also acquired a stone wall with watchtowers. The 1658 fire was among the worst of all -- it consumed most of the remaining wooden structures, including the ancient Kremlin, and that Kremlin was never rebuilt. From that point forward, Yaroslavl grew as a city of brick and mortar. The shift was irreversible.

• 5. The Year Yaroslavl Ran Russia

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  In the spring of 1608, a pretender to the Russian throne had routed the army of Tsar Vasily Shuisky at Bolkhov and set up camp at Tushino, twelve versts from Moscow. Polish-Lithuanian forces occupied the capital. In May 1609, a Polish army under Aleksander Józef Lisowski tried to take Yaroslavl. The city's residents withdrew behind earthen walls, and when Lisowski managed to breach those through deception, they retreated again into the Kremlin and the two stone monasteries. The siege lasted until May 22. The Poles left without taking the city. The following year, despite another attempt to dislodge the Polish occupiers from Moscow, Russian forces failed. Then, in 1611, Kuzma Minin and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky raised an army in Nizhny Novgorod and marched toward Moscow. Their route took them through Yaroslavl, where they stayed from April to June of 1612. During those months, with the capital under foreign control, Yaroslavl became the de facto seat of Russian government. The most consequential matters of state were decided there. The army rested, resupplied with help from the city's residents, and then moved on. Moscow was liberated. The Polish-Lithuanian intervention ended. Yaroslavl had provided not just shelter but the institutional framework that allowed the Russian state to reconstitute itself.

• 6. Trade, Theater, and Urban Form

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  Yaroslavl's position on the Volga made it a natural waypoint between Moscow and the northern port of Arkhangelsk, and between Europe and the Orient. English and German merchants maintained shipping berths and warehouses in the city during the 16th century. By the end of the 17th century, the city's population had grown to around 15,000 -- enough to make it Russia's second-largest city after Moscow. Around 700 people eventually worked in the city's leather workshops alone. The founding of Saint Petersburg in 1703 by Peter the Great began to shift trade away from Arkhangelsk and thus from Yaroslavl, but the city responded by investing in industry. In 1772, Ivan Tames opened a textiles factory on the right bank of the Kotorosl; that plant still operates today under the name Textile factory Krasny Perekop. Catherine the Great's administrative reforms led to Yaroslavl being made a governorate center in 1777, and in 1778 the city received its own coat of arms and an urban development plan drawn up by Ivan Starov. That plan centered on the Ilyinskaya Square and Church of Elijah the Prophet and called for a network of wide, tree-lined boulevards flanked by classicist buildings. The city's first theater, the Volkov Theater, had already been founded in 1750 by Fyodor Volkov -- making it, by official count, the oldest theater in Russia. Its current neoclassical building dates from 1911. Valentina Tereshkova, who in 1963 became the first woman in space, was born in the Yaroslavl area and began her flight training at Karachikha airfield.

• 7. War, Rebellion, and the 20th Century

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  The Yaroslavl Rebellion of 1918 lasted from the 6th to the 21st of July. Conservative activists tried to remove the Bolshevik municipal government by force. They held large sections of the city before the Red Army surrounded it, cut off supplies, and bombarded it day and night with artillery and aircraft. When the rebellion ended, official figures recorded around 600 deaths among residents; roughly 2,000 buildings were destroyed or badly damaged. The city's economy contracted sharply in the aftermath. Recovery came through Soviet industrialization. The 1926 municipal power plant, the Yaroslavl Tyre Factory founded in 1928, and the 1933 rubber-asbestos works all came in quick succession. The railway bridge over the Volga -- built in 1913 -- made Yaroslavl the only crossing point on the river in the region, which turned it into a major target for German air raids in 1942-1943. On the 11th of June 1943, a single raid killed more than 120 residents and injured around 150 others, while destroying around 200 buildings. About 200,000 people from the Yaroslavl area died on the fronts during World War II; a monument and eternal flame near the mouth of the Kotorosl, opened in 1968, marks that loss. During the Blockade of Leningrad, children evacuated across the frozen Lake Ladoga on the Road of Life were brought to Yaroslavl for safety. The city also held German prisoners of war at Camp No. 276.

• 8. The Millennium and Its Crash

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  In July 2005, Yaroslavl's historic center was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Preparations for the city's millennium -- the 1,000th anniversary of its founding -- had already begun that year. The celebration was held on the second weekend of September 2010, and the federal government in Moscow helped fund major road and rail improvements across the city. A new bridge over the Volga, now called the Jubilee Bridge, opened in 2006 as part of those preparations. The Yaroslavl Zoo opened in August 2008 and was expanded again in 2010. Beginning in 2009, the city also became the host of the Yaroslavl Global Policy Forum on global security and governance; participants have included French prime minister François Fillon and Spanish prime minister José Zapatero. President Dmitry Medvedev was attending the forum at the Lokomotiv arena on the 7th of September 2011, when the city's KHL ice hockey team boarded a plane at Tunoshna Airport for their first match of the season. The aircraft crashed on takeoff. Most of the players on Lokomotiv Yaroslavl perished. Medvedev postponed his scheduled meetings to travel to the crash site and meet the families. Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin also came to the city. As a tribute, Yaroslavl co-hosted the 2012 Canada-Russia Challenge with Halifax, Nova Scotia. The millennium celebration and the plane crash arrived in the same season -- Yaroslavl's thousandth year was its most celebrated and its most grieved.