Tyumen

Long before Russians came, the site was Chimgi-Tura, or Chingi-Tura, a Tatar town that served as the capital of the Siberian Khanate in the 15th century. Its name comes from the Turkic and Mongolic word for ten thousand. The Cossack leader Yermak conquered the area in 1585, and the fighting destroyed the khanate's capitals. On 29 July 1586 Tsar Feodor I ordered a fortress built on the ruins, and Tyumen became the first Russian settlement in Siberia. It stood on the Tyumen portage, an old trade route between Central Asia and the Volga, and for decades raids by Siberian Tatars and Kalmyks kept its population mostly made up of streltsy and Cossack garrisons.

By the 18th century Tyumen was a trading town between Siberia, China and central Russia, known for its leatherworkers and blacksmiths; Swedish prisoners taken at Poltava in 1709 arrived, and some stayed. The first steamboat in Siberia was built here in 1836. The railway arrived in 1885, and for some years Tyumen was the empire's easternmost railhead, where cargo moved between trains and the boats of the Tura, Tobol, Irtysh and Ob. By 1900 it had passed its old rival Tobolsk, which it replaced as the regional capital when Tyumen Oblast was created in 1944.

The Civil War brought Kolchak's Whites and the Reds in turn, and the 1930s made Tyumen an industrial city. In 1941 twenty-two factories were evacuated here from the west and the town became a hospital city; Lenin's body was secretly hidden in a building of what is now the agricultural academy. The discovery of oil and gas in the 1960s made Tyumen the supply base for the fields around Surgut and Nizhnevartovsk, and tens of thousands of workers arrived, faster than the city could plan for them.

Tyumen's sense of itself rests on being first — the first Russian town in Siberia, the gateway from the Urals — and on the oil wealth that has rebuilt much of it. The old merchant town survives in brick and wooden houses with carved details, and the city is nicknamed the Capital of Villages for its many timber houses. The Tura embankment, rebuilt as a terraced promenade, is now its main public space, and Lovers' Bridge has become a symbol of the city: newlyweds come for photographs, and so many love locks are hung on it that they are cut off every couple of years.

A local story is commemorated in the Square of Siberian Cats. In 1944 the city collected cats and sent 238 of them to Leningrad, where the siege had left the Hermitage overrun with rats, and they helped found a new population of cats in the city. Cultural life centres on the drama theatre, which dates from 1858, a philharmonic orchestra, museums and the University of Tyumen, which has more than 27,000 students.

The population is mainly Russian and Orthodox, but the old Bukharskaya Sloboda has a mostly Muslim population, and there are mosques, a synagogue and a Catholic church. The biathlete Anton Shipulin is among the sportsmen who call Tyumen their home town. The children's writer Vladislav Krapivin, also born in the city, is its best-known literary name.

About 847,000 people lived in Tyumen at the 2021 census, up from about 510,000 in 2002, the growth coming mainly from migration and from absorbing surrounding settlements. The city is a service and management centre for the oil and gas industry of Western Siberia, with the offices of large energy companies, oilfield service firms, design institutes, factories and a shipyard, alongside universities, hospitals and the oblast government.

The cityscape is a mix: the historic centre and the old sloboda suburbs of low brick and wooden houses; a band of 1950s–70s blocks east of the centre, where most offices are; five-storey prefabricated estates from the 1960s and 70s that now count as central and green; and newer high-rise estates on the southern and south-eastern edges, which residents consider the least pleasant places to live. Rapid growth without much planning has left the city with congested roads; paid parking was introduced in 2015.

The Tura shapes the year. Spring floods peak in the second half of May, held back by a dike, and summer evenings are spent on the embankment. Winters are long and very cold, and the geothermal springs on the outskirts are popular with residents and with visitors from the neighbouring regions.

Tyumen eats the food of the Urals and Siberia. Pelmeni, small dumplings of thin unleavened dough filled with minced meat, became a staple of Russian cooking during the expansion into the Urals and Siberia; in Siberia they were traditionally frozen outdoors in winter and kept as preserved food, and they are served with butter or smetana (sour cream), or Siberian-style with vinegar and ground pepper. Tatar cooking has its own version, pilmän, served in a clear soup with dill.

Siberian Russian cooking makes much of the whitefish of the northern rivers, such as muksun and the Arctic cisco, and of local methods of eating them raw, frozen or with spices. The best known is stroganina, long thin shavings of frozen raw fish, a dish of the northern Russians and the Indigenous peoples of Arctic Siberia, made with nelma, muksun or other whitefish.

To drink there is kvass, a cloudy, sweet-and-sour, low-alcohol drink fermented from rye bread, and mors, a still drink made from lingonberries or cranberries. Most eating out happens in the cafés and restaurants of the historic centre and around Tsvetnoy Boulevard, and in self-service canteens where diners pick dishes from a counter.