Ufa

People have lived around Ufa since the Palaeolithic, and a medieval town may have stood here: 14th-century maps, including the Catalan Atlas of 1375, mark a town called Pascherti, or Bashkort, near the Belaya, and the historian Ibn Khaldun counted Bashkort among the larger cities of the Golden Horde. The Russian city dates from 1574, when Ivan the Terrible ordered a fortress built on the hill of Tura-Tau after the Bashkirs accepted Moscow's rule; it became a town in 1586. For two centuries it was a frontier fort, periodically attacked by rebellious Bashkirs, and was caught up in Pugachev's rebellion of 1773–75, in which the Bashkir poet and commander Salawat Yulayev fought.

Catherine II made the city the seat of the Muslim Spiritual Assembly, the official body of Russia's Muslims, and Ufa became a centre of Islamic learning with madrasas that still stand. It became capital of its own governorate in 1865, and the Belaya steamship route (1870) and the Samara–Zlatoust railway (1890) linked it to European Russia. The singer Fyodor Chaliapin, at the start of his career, sang in an operetta chorus here in 1890.

Ufa went on to become the capital of the Bashkir ASSR, the first autonomous republic of Soviet Russia, and of today's Republic of Bashkortostan. Factories evacuated in 1941 and the oil boom after the war turned a modest town into a refining and engineering city, and it passed a million people in 1980. In 1989 a gas explosion beside the railway about 75 km away killed 575 train passengers. Ufa hosted the BRICS and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summits in 2015.

Ufa is Bashkir, Tatar and Russian at once. Ethnic Russians are the majority, but Bashkirs and Tatars are numerous, and Sunni Islam and Orthodoxy are the main faiths; the Central Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Russia and the Russian Islamic University, opened in 1989, are based here. Almost all of the city's mosques have been rebuilt or newly built, the best known being Lala Tulpan, while the modest classical mosque of 1830 recalls the old Muslim administration.

Salawat Yulayev, the 18th-century rebel and poet, is the republic's hero: his statue on the bluff appears on the coat of arms, an opera about him was written in 1955, and the city's ice hockey club bears his name. Modern Bashkir architecture, with national motifs, can be seen in the drama theatre and the Dynamo stadium beside it. The art museum is named after the Ufa-born painter Mikhail Nesterov.

Sabantuy, the summer "plough's feast", is celebrated in the city as well as the villages. Ice hockey is the passion: Salavat Yulaev won the Gagarin Cup in 2011. Ufa's odder touches include its nickname, the City of Three Screws, from the look of its Bashkir name, ӨФӨ, and a 2020 monument to a tick.

About 1.19 million people lived in Ufa in 2025, with up to 1.4 million in the wider area. The city runs for more than 50 km along a narrow plateau between the rivers: the old centre in the south, Soviet districts in the middle, and the refineries and engine works of Chernikovka in the north.

Oil refining, petrochemicals and engineering dominate. The oil company Bashneft has its headquarters here and runs the city's refineries and petrochemical plant, and a large works builds gas-turbine engines. There are about 200 large and medium industrial enterprises and several universities, including Bashkir State University and the aviation and petroleum universities. In the post-war decades the population grew with the region's oil and chemical industries.

Air pollution is a recurring concern, with suspended dust above permitted levels recorded across the city's monitoring posts in 2017, and the city suffers from traffic congestion and a lack of parking. A long-promised metro has been frozen indefinitely; in 2024 a new eastern road exit with a bridge and tunnel opened instead. Evenings outside the centre are quiet, as public transport winds down after about 10 pm.

Bashkir cooking grew from a semi-nomadic, cattle-raising way of life: boiled and dried horse meat and lamb, dairy products, dried berries and grains, and honey. Bishbarmak — finely chopped boiled meat with noodles and an onion sauce, its name meaning "five fingers" — is a fixture of the festive table. Qazı, horse-meat sausage, is eaten with thick slices of fat, and qurut is a dried fermented-milk product. Kumis, mildly alcoholic fermented mare's milk, is important to the Bashkirs as to other steppe peoples.

Honey is a matter of national pride, above all the honey of the Burzyan bee, and no tea is served without it. The "Bashkir tea party" is a meal in itself: tea always taken with milk, with pies, boiled meat, sausage, sour cream, jam and honey. Chak-chak, small balls of fried dough piled into a mound and drenched in hot honey, is popular in both Bashkortostan and Tatarstan.

Russian dishes — borsch, pelmeni, blini — are just as common, and in summer shashlik is grilled in squares and outside shopping centres across the city.