Kislovodsk

People lived in the valley long before the town: archaeologists working about 10 km south of Kislovodsk have found the remains of a Koban-culture settlement of the 9th–7th centuries BC, along with Sarmatian and Alan remains. At the end of the 18th century the valley was uninhabited border land, with a small Abaza settlement and the Narzan spring, which the naturalist Peter Simon Pallas studied in detail in 1793. In 1798 Count Morkov, commander on the Caucasus Line, camped above the spring and took heated Narzan baths for his asthma — the start of the resort seasons.

In 1803 Alexander I ordered a fort built at the "sour waters", and soldiers who finished their service there settled nearby, founding the town's first streets. Pushkin stayed in the fort in 1820 and returned in 1829. General Yermolov had the park laid out from 1823, Kurortny Boulevard opened in 1836, and the Gothic-revival Narzan Gallery followed in the middle of the century. Lermontov set several scenes of A Hero of Our Time, published in 1840, in and around the town. The railway from Mineralnye Vody arrived in 1894, electric light in 1895, and Kislovodsk gained town status in 1903; Fyodor Chaliapin spent 1917 in a dacha here.

Under Soviet rule the villas and boarding houses became sanatoriums, and some twenty new ones were built before the Second World War, many now listed as monuments of 1930s architecture. In August 1941 thirty-six military hospitals were set up in them. Since 2006 Kislovodsk has been a resort city of federal significance, and it has more health resorts than anywhere in Russia except Sochi.

The town's culture grew out of the resort season. Russian writers came for the waters and left it in literature: Pushkin stayed twice, Lermontov made the rocks and gorges around Kislovodsk the setting for the duel in A Hero of Our Time, and the Ring Mountain arch and Lermontov Rock are still walked to for that reason. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born here in 1918, and a monument to him by Zurab Tsereteli was unveiled on Chaliapin Street in 2018.

Music has its own institutions. The North Caucasus State Philharmonic occupies the 1895 kursaal of the Vladikavkaz Railway, with a large hall and an organ hall, and the Chaliapin dacha, now a literary and music museum, has held an annual Chaliapin season of concerts since 1991. The town has also hosted film festivals, including the Golden Knight festival in 2007.

Kislovodsk is largely Russian and Orthodox, but it has long drawn people from across the Caucasus. A Jewish community built a synagogue and a rabbi's house on Kuibyshev Street in 1890, later requisitioned by the Soviet authorities, and a cathedral mosque stands on Koltsova Street. The town's names in the neighbouring languages — Narsana in Karachay-Balkar, Nartsane in Kabardian — refer to the same famous spring. Resort manners are relaxed: the evening walk along the boulevard and through the park is a ritual for residents and visitors alike.

About 129,000 people lived in Kislovodsk at the 2010 census, making it one of the four main towns of the Caucasian Mineral Waters, alongside Pyatigorsk, Yessentuki and Zheleznovodsk. The town sits in a narrow mountain valley about seven kilometres long, at heights from 725 metres to over 1,400 metres on its highest hill, so streets climb and twist and different districts sit at very different levels.

The economy is the resort. The town has more than forty sanatoriums and hotels, many of them in listed buildings of the 1930s, and the bottling of mineral water, begun in a small plant in 1896, continues. Fruit orchards cover parts of the surrounding hills, and higher up the slopes give way to sub-alpine meadows.

Life follows the resort calendar, busiest in the dry, sunny weeks of late summer and autumn and quieter in winter. Suburban electric trains tie the town to its neighbours, and the station and boulevard are its busiest places. The national picture of wartime controls on speech, assembly and media applies here as across Russia.

Kislovodsk's most famous product is a drink. Narzan, the naturally carbonated mineral water whose taste gave the town its Russian name, "sour water", has been bottled here since 1896, and dolomite narzans are piped for drinking to the Narzan Gallery, the Round pump room and a newer pump room on Mira Avenue.

Food in the town is a mix of Russian resort cooking and the dishes of the Caucasus. Shashlik, skewered and grilled cubes of meat, is known by other names in the Caucasus and became popular across much of the Russian Empire from the 19th century.

Kvass, a fermented, low-alcohol drink traditionally made from rye bread or rye flour and malt, has a sweet and sour taste. The water of the original Narzan spring, where the resort began, is used mainly for baths rather than drinking, and the old bottling works was rebuilt and mechanised in the early Soviet years.