Surroundings & Recreation

Ekaterinburg

Ekaterinburg, Russia’s third-largest city, lies at the junction of Europe and Asia. Since the 17th century, it has been the country’s most important city for industry. Ekaterinburg today is a centre of business, finance and banking as well as the cultural and science centre for the entire region.

Cultural highlights

The extremely neat and tidy city has plenty to offer in terms of culture. The many sights and attractions include the historic old town as well as a number of churches and architectural monuments from the 18th and 19th centuries, such as the Mountain Chancellory (1739), the Ascension of Christ Cathedral (19th century), the first wooden dam on the Iset river, the Church of the Holy Trinity, the pretty 18th century merchant homes and much more. Ekaterinburg is also famous for its Church on the Blood, the site of the execution in 1918 of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. Today a monument stands to the Romanov family.

Nearby Nizhny Tagil features a museum park telling the story of mining in the Central Ural region, as well as a monument to the father-and-son engineers Cherepanov, who built Russia’s first steam locomotive here.

Not far from Nizhny Tagil is the site known as “Ermakovo Gorodishche”. Discovered in 1945, it was form this camp that, in the year 1581, the Cossack explorer Yermak Timofeyevich set off to conquer Siberia.

Grigori Rasputin lived as a monk at Verkhoturje Monastery and served at Trinity Cathedral. Several theatres, a philharmonic orchestra, a circus, a zoo, art galleries and a number of different museums top off the city’s cultural life.