Yaroslavl

In the 9th century a Scandinavian-Slavic settlement at nearby Timerevo traded along the Volga. Tradition says Yaroslav the Wise, prince of Rostov, founded the city where he first stepped ashore at the Strelka, making it the oldest existing town on the Volga. From 1218 it was the capital of a Principality of Yaroslavl, until Moscow absorbed it in 1463. The Golden Horde sacked it in 1257, 1293 and 1322.

Its Volga position made it rich. In the 16th century English and German merchants kept warehouses here. From April to June 1612, while Minin and Pozharsky's volunteer army gathered here before liberating Moscow, it was the country's de facto capital. In the 17th century it was Russia's second-largest city, and merchants paid for many of the brick churches that still define the old town. After a fire in 1658 destroyed most of its remaining wooden buildings, including the old kremlin, the city was rebuilt almost entirely in brick, and in 1778 a new classical plan was drawn around Ilyinskaya Square.

Industry came with the Tames textile mill of 1772 and the railway to Moscow in 1870. In July 1918 an anti-Bolshevik uprising was crushed by the Red Army with artillery and aircraft, killing about 600 residents and wrecking some 2,000 buildings. Soviet industrialisation brought rubber, tyre and engine plants, German air raids struck the vital Volga rail bridge in 1942–43, and the population passed half a million in 1968; and in 2005 the historic centre joined the UNESCO list. In 2011 almost the whole Lokomotiv hockey team died in a plane crash on take-off from the city's airport.

Yaroslavl's architecture is its signature. The Yaroslavl school of the 17th century produced brick churches with clusters of domes, coloured glazed tiles and interiors covered in frescoes, of which St John the Baptist at Tolchkovo is considered the finest. The city's coat of arms, a bear holding a golden halberd, is tied to the legend of the city's founding, and the bear appears on monuments and flowerbeds across the city.

The city regards itself as the home of Russian theatre. Fyodor Volkov founded the Volkov Theatre in the 1750s as Russia's first public theatre; it is regarded as the country's oldest drama theatre and has occupied its present building since 1911. The poet Nikolay Nekrasov, who lived and worked at nearby Karabikha, is remembered in a museum there.

Sport means ice hockey. Lokomotiv Yaroslavl recovered from the 2011 air disaster to become one of the strongest clubs in Russia, Russian champions in 1997, 2002 and 2003 and winner of the Gagarin Cup in 2025 and 2026, and home games fill Arena 2000. The city's millennium was celebrated in September 2010, when the rebuilt Dormition Cathedral was consecrated by the Patriarch.

About 564,000 people lived in Yaroslavl in 2025, slightly fewer than the 577,000 counted at the 2021 census. The city is the capital of Yaroslavl Oblast and one of the main industrial centres of central Russia, with a large oil refinery, a petrochemical plant, a tyre factory, a diesel engine works and the old Krasny Perekop textile mill.

The city spreads along both banks of the Volga and the Kotorosl. The old town on the right bank holds the offices, theatres and the university, which traces its roots to a school of higher sciences opened in 1803. From the 1960s large residential districts spread across the city, for the first time onto the left bank of the Volga, and Neftestroy in the south has grown around the refinery and the hockey arena.

Several railways and highways meet here, and long-distance trains between Moscow and Siberia pass through. Summer life centres on the Volga embankment and the Strelka, where residents stroll in the evenings, while winter revolves around the hockey season.

Food in Yaroslavl is the everyday cooking of central Russia: cabbage shchi, buckwheat kasha, pelmeni dumplings and pickled cucumbers and mushrooms gathered in the autumn woods, served with kvass or tea, and at a proper table with vodka and a round of toasts. Blini are eaten in quantity at Maslenitsa, the pancake week before Lent, with sour cream, smoked fish or curd.

The city's long history as a Volga trading port shows less in its dishes than in its setting. The best place to eat out is the Volga promenade, where restaurants and cafés look over the river, and the streets around Volkov Square in the old town hold more cafés and bars. Canteen-style stolovaya eateries, where diners take a tray along a counter, are the cheap everyday choice across Russian cities.

Festive tables open with zakuski — pickled vegetables, cured fish, salads and black bread — and stuffed pirozhki buns are an everyday snack. Tea, often taken with jam, remains a fixture of the Russian table.