Samara

Long before the city, the Arab envoy Ahmad ibn Fadlan passed through the area around 921 on his way to the Volga Bulgars, and a Volga port called Samara appears on Italian maps of the 14th century. The Samara Bend was a nest of river pirates until 1586, when a wooden fortress with eleven towers was built at the meeting of the Volga and the Samara River. A customs office followed in 1600. It opened its gates to the rebel armies of Stepan Razin and Yemelyan Pugachev, welcoming them with bread and salt.

In 1851 Samara became the capital of its own governorate, with about 20,000 people, and the railway to Orenburg, built through the city in 1875–77, strengthened its role as a major trading centre. It was renamed Kuybyshev in 1935 after the Bolshevik Valerian Kuybyshev. In October 1941, with Moscow threatened, government offices, foreign embassies and leading theatres were evacuated here and the city served as the Soviet Union's reserve capital until the summer of 1943. Stalin's bunker was dug beneath the regional party building in 1942 but never used, and Shostakovich finished his Seventh Symphony in the city.

After the war the defence industry grew rapidly and Kuybyshev became a closed city. The Vostok launcher that carried Yuri Gagarin into orbit in 1961 was built at the Progress plant, and Gagarin rested here after his flight. The city took back the name Samara in January 1991, opened up, and hosted World Cup matches in 2018.

Samara has an opera and ballet theatre on Kuybyshev Square, a philharmonic hall and five drama theatres. Its architecture is a large part of its identity: more than 2,000 heritage buildings, from carved wooden houses to the Art Nouveau mansions of merchant families, though many ensembles were lost to a "concrete tsunami" of new blocks after the 1990s. The writers Aleksey Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky and the painters Ilya Repin and Vasily Surikov all lived in the city.

The wartime years remain central to local pride. The city carries the titles "City of Labour and Combat Glory" and "City of Labour Valour", and a parade on Kuybyshev Square each November recalls the parade of 1941. The space age is the other civic theme, celebrated by the Soyuz rocket on Lenin Avenue and an aerospace museum at the university.

Music has its own tradition in the Grushinsky Festival, held near the city since 1968, which grew from a gathering of bard singer-songwriters into an open-air event that drew 140,000 spectators in 1997. Football means Krylia Sovetov, and Samara is also a centre of ice speedway. The city is multi-confessional, with an Orthodox majority and Catholic, Armenian, Muslim and Jewish communities.

About 1.15 million people lived in Samara in 2025, and up to 1.22 million in the wider urban area. The city stretches along the Volga, and for most of the 20th century it had two centres: the old merchant town by the river and Bezymyanka, the factory district to the east built up after the war, with Soviet housing estates between them.

Industry still dominates. Samara builds launch vehicles and satellites at the Progress rocket centre and engines at the Kuznetsov design bureau, makes aircraft, cable and rolled aluminium, and refines oil, and it is one of the main university cities of the Volga, led by its aerospace university. Since 2025 Ukrainian drones have struck the oil refinery at nearby Novokuybyshevsk.

Summer life moves to the river: the embankment, the city beach, boats across to the Zhiguli hills and weekends at the dacha. Winter means snow-covered streets. Most people get around by tram, bus or the single metro line, and an eleventh metro station has been under construction for several years.

Samara eats the food of the middle Volga: Russian soups such as borsch and shchi, pelmeni dumplings, blini, kasha and pirozhki, cold okroshka in summer, and fish from the river, including ukha, a clear Russian fish soup. Zakuski of pickled cucumbers and mushrooms, herring and black bread open a proper meal, with toasts. Echpochmak, the triangular Tatar and Bashkir turnover of chopped meat, onion and potatoes, spread to public canteens across the Soviet Union from the late 1960s.

The city's own contribution is beer. The Austrian Alfred von Vacano founded a brewery here in 1881 that made "Viennese Beer"; in the 1930s, legend has it, it was renamed Zhigulevskoye, and in Soviet times it was at times almost the only beer brand found anywhere in the country. The old brewery still stands on Volzhsky Prospekt by the embankment, with a bar and a restaurant nearby.

Kvass, the mildly fermented rye drink, and strong tea with jam are the everyday drinks. Georgian food is served in the old town, and in summer cafés line the Volga promenade.