Irkutsk

Russian traders reached the Angara in 1652, when Ivan Pokhabov built winter quarters near the site to collect fur tribute from the Buryats. In 1661 Yakov Pokhabov built a fort, an ostrog, on the spot where Kirov Square now lies, and Irkutsk received town rights in 1686. Settlers from northern Russia built the trading quarter beyond its walls. The Siberian road from Moscow arrived in 1760, and goods from China came through Kyakhta — tea, silk, furs and gold — benefiting the town's economy. From 1764 it governed the whole of Eastern Siberia, to the Pacific, and in 1821 it became the seat of the Governor-General of East Siberia.

Irkutsk was also a place of exile. The officers of the Decembrist revolt of 1825 were sent to Siberia, and those who settled here, with the wives who followed them, made the town a centre of intellectual and social life; by the end of the 19th century there was one exile for every two locals. Leaders of the Polish Baikal insurrection were executed here in 1866. A fire in July 1879 destroyed three-quarters of the city, about 4,000 houses, but it recovered quickly: electricity came in 1896 and the railway in 1898, and by 1900 it was called the Paris of Siberia.

The Civil War brought bitter fighting, and in 1920 the White leader Admiral Kolchak was executed here. In the Great Terror between 15,000 and 17,000 victims were buried on the outskirts. The Soviet era brought the aircraft works, founded in 1932, and the Irkutsk dam and reservoir in the 1950s. In December 2016, 74 people died in a mass methanol poisoning. The historic centre is on UNESCO's tentative list of World Heritage Sites.

The Decembrists are the heart of the city's self-image. The exiles made Irkutsk the centre of intellectual and social life in Eastern Siberia and developed much of its cultural heritage, and two of their houses are now museums. Before the revolution the city was called the East Paris, Siberian Petersburg and the Siberian Athens; today it has the Okhlopkov Drama Theatre, one of the oldest in Russia, a Catholic cathedral known for organ concerts, and a state university founded in 1918.

Wooden architecture is the city's signature: log houses with carved window frames, shutters and eaves survive in the old streets, and the 130th Quarter recreates a whole block of them. The coat of arms shows a babr — originally a Siberian tiger — holding a sable, a word so misread by a 19th-century heraldist as 'beaver' that the local authorities came to depict it as half-tiger, half-beaver. Irkutsk was home to the writer Valentin Rasputin, whose books are set in the Angara valley, and the city appears in Jules Verne's novel Michael Strogoff.

The city has always been mostly Russian; at the 1897 census Jews made up 6.5 per cent of the population, Poles 2 per cent, and Tatars and Buryats smaller shares. Bandy is the great spectator sport: Baykal-Energiya plays in the national Super League, and the city is the centre of women's bandy in Russia. Summer weekends are spent at the dacha or on the shores of Baikal.

About 606,000 people lived in Irkutsk in 2025 by official estimates, against about 588,000 at the 2010 census. Regional plans group the city with the neighbouring industrial towns of Shelekhov and Angarsk in a metropolitan area of more than a million. The largest industry is the Irkut aircraft plant, best known for the Su-30 family of fighters; universities, research institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the Academgorodok suburb, and the regional administration provide much of the rest.

The city is split by the Angara into the left bank, with the railway and the main roads, and the right bank, with the historic centre; the Ushakovka divides off the monastery and the old port. Stone buildings fill the streets nearest the river, wooden houses the old outskirts, and Soviet blocks surround them. Trams, trolleybuses and marshrutkas carry most people around.

Public health is a long-standing concern: in 2018 men in Irkutsk had an average life expectancy of only 63. Winters are long and very cold, and the rhythm of the year turns on summer — the dacha, berry picking and weekends on Baikal.

Baikal fish defines Irkutsk's table. Omul, a whitefish of the salmon family found only in Lake Baikal, is a delicacy and the object of one of the lake's largest fisheries; it is eaten smoked and salted, alongside sig (whitefish) and kharius (Arctic grayling), and hot-smoked kharius is sold in the lakeside villages. Around Baikal the frozen raw fish dish known elsewhere as stroganina is called raskolotka: whitefish such as omul eaten in thin shavings, frozen.

The Buryat neighbours brought pozy (buuz), large steamed dumplings filled with meat, a dish of Mongolian and Buryat cooking traditionally made at the Lunar New Year and eaten with the hands. Siberian pelmeni, small dumplings of thin dough around minced meat, are boiled in salted water or broth and carefully drained, since serving them in soup is thought poor taste in Siberia.

The Central Market is the place for smoked fish and for the roe of sig and kharius. To drink there is kvass, a cloudy, sweet-and-sour, low-alcohol drink fermented from rye bread, and mors, made from lingonberries or cranberries, and the cafés of the 130th Quarter and the old centre are where most of the city eats out.