Cityguide Cityguide

When we fly over the Urals, we feel without having to say a word that we have not only reached another continent but indeed another world, for here is the gateway to Siberia. The deep green forests seem massive, even from the height of the aeroplane, and the clouds are unrealistically rolling above the long stretching city of one and a half million underneath. We get in a car at the airport and drive through birch woods, arriving shortly at a long green line, which marks where Europe ends and Asia begins. We assume the pose of fairy tale giants in seven-league boots - one foot here, the other already in another continent. On the way to the city we pass a little village comprising bumpy roads and small ornamented houses built of wood. It's as if we had dropped by Chekhov's Russia. First, I enthuse loudly. Later I just contemplate quietly, thinking how nice it would be to remain here a little while. These forests and villages represent the wonders which were hidden in the past decades. I feel myself chosen. After all, for years strangers could not see these streets and houses, could not meet these people.

"How do you like our city?", asks the tram conductor while giving back the change from 10 roubles. We are feverishly trying to dig deep into the ruins of our Russian, when she slaps our shoulders laughing. "Stariy", she exclaims and, by way of explanation, points at the grey hair of a fellow passenger. Yet Yekaterinburg is not old, though it has witnessed a great deal. It was barely three hundred years ago when two military men, captain Vasiliy Tatishev and Dutch lieutenant Willim de Gennin, founded the city on the orders of Tsar Peter the Great, naming it Yekaterinburg in honour of his wife, Catherine I. (The two gentlemen in bronze watch over the city even today, their twin statue simply known as "Beavis and Butthead" by the locals.) Beautiful wooden houses were erected. Their successors, although somewhat tired and faded, can still be found at the feet of 21st-century skyscrapers. Here we can also find echoes of the world's first gold fever, mementos of the gold age which generated a flourishing wellbeing in the 19th century. Contemporaries referred to the new Asian Eldorado as the "golden valley of Yekaterinburg", since no matter where they stepped there was gold everywhere.

"For a distance of 200 versts, we were, so to say, progressing on gold fields. On both sides of the road we continuously saw gold dust - the road itself was gold", enthused one eyewitness. In addition to gold there were plenty of emerald, sapphire, diamond and several other precious stones, such that Yekaterinburg soon became one of the gem centres of the world. The churches were adorned with an array of golden cupolas and the homes of the gold traders were lavish. Walking along Karl Liebknecht Road or Vainer Street, which is today a busy shopping thoroughfare, we discover the mansions of former gold traders such as Agafurov and Haritonov, which preserve the traces of the golden life in the 19th century. They are actually palaces, with beautiful parks and lakes.

Although Yekaterinburg was founded by Peter the Great, it is not primarily because of him that the name of the Romanovs is associated with the city. In 1918, Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra and five children, Tatiana, Anastasia, Aleksey, Maria and Olga, together with their four loyal servants, were executed here, in the Ipatev House. In recent years a cathedral was erected to replace the building. The Cathedral-on-the-Blood, Yekaterinburg's largest place of worship, was consecrated in 2003, on the 85th anniversary of the massacre. On entering, after we have put on headscarves laid out at the entrance, we see that icons of all the members of the imperial family, who have since been canonized, are among the saints. Visitors make the sign of the cross before them. A woman with headscarf is praying to them, murmuring loudly. The Soviet authorities were able, at most, to delay pilgrimages by a few decades, but could not prevent them.

Six years after the murder of the tsar and his family the city's name was changed - instead of Catherine it now commemorated Yakov M. Sverdlovsk, Lenin's close colleague who ordered the execution of the Romanovs. A couple of decades later, the city of Sverdlovsk became a gateway to the Gulag for a continuous succession of 'class enemies', condemned to forced labour in Siberia. Sverdlovsk turned into the antechamber of death, a description which in a way also applied to what the city became during World War II, when hundreds of factories were moved here from different parts of the country, so that the tools of the Soviet military machine could be manufactured unnoticed in the shadow of the Urals. It was here where Marshal Zhukov found 'exile' in the first post-war decade and where the career of Boris Yeltsin, the city's most prominent son and Russia's first president, took off.

Soviet times, like all others before them, have left their mark - broad boulevards and gigantic grey buildings, such as those of the Philharmonic Society or the Technical University of the Urals.

Yet the city, this great survivor, has already opened a new chapter. As the towers of power stations rose behind the golden domes of the cathedrals, today glass palaces are already being built - at an incredible pace and in large numbers - in the direct proximity of Sovietera blocks. Walking in the city reveals that past centuries appear to coexist harmoniously. Not far from the cathedral devoted to the Romanovs, for example, streets still preserve the names of Lenin, Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and even Sverdlov. So Yekaterinburg has opened up, the secrets have been tamed, as has the old locomotive engine which, red star on its front, used to serve the war. Now it stands in a playground right by a climbing frame. Children go up and down the engine, which is almost completely hidden behind colourful graffiti.

Nevertheless, the legacy of the 'closed city' can be felt. If we are lost we can't often rely on help in English. After all, no foreigners came here before the beginning of the 1990s. But the locals are so friendly and informal that they wait patiently until we understand them in Russian and somehow we always do.

Nagy Anna