"The city is ancient, the city is glorious …" - the Ural singer Alexander Novikov sings in his popular song about Yekaterinburg. Of course, any city in the world, whose history goes back almost three hundred years, is capable of boasting not only glorious deeds and famous natives, but also extensive sights that attract attention. The Ural capital, whose date of birth is 1723, is no exception.
Football with mayonnaise
Modern Yekaterinburg is not only a world record holder for eating local mayonnaise, but also one of the cities of Russia that has gathered to host the 2018 football world championship. But there are other attractions in it.
The clock strikes on the main tower …
The center and concentration of the main "beauty" of the main city of the region and the federal district is the Leninsky district. It is here that the place of all mass festivities is located under the name Plotinka with its Historical Square, the Olympic clock, the main city museums and the administration building, on the tower of which the old clock praised by Novikov beats regularly.
Leninsky district is also the square named after 1905, on the cobblestones of which summer biathlon competitions on artificial snow have recently been held. And modern monuments to Vladimir Vysotsky with Marina Vlady, the main character of the sketch "Happy Together" to Gene Bukin, a computer keyboard, Panikovsky, a guitar neck and even the Invisible Man of Herbert Wells.
A huge television tower, unfinished since the 1980s, causes a lot of sarcastic jokes among local residents. Experts say that in terms of a height of 361 meters, it could well become the second in the USSR and Russia after the Ostankino TV tower and the highest in Asia. But the city circus named after Yuri Nikulin, standing next to the eternal "unfinished" city, is famous for its unique openwork dome made of lattice semi-arches. They say that there is an analogue of this design only in Brazil.
The tragic history of Yekaterinburg includes one of its most beautiful and oldest mansions, the estate of the merchant Kharitonov-Rastorguev. According to the legends and stories of not only historians, but also the author of the "Privalov Millions" of the writer Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak, the Ural merchant-Old Believer forced the author of the estate project to hang himself, sending him to life hard labor in Tobolsk, brought his wife to the grave, doomed his daughter to suicide and finally died at the hands of his mistress and her new friend. It is curious that in the days of the USSR, the Palace of Pioneers was located in the estate. And opposite her, in the house of engineer Ipatiev, they shot the last Russian tsar and erected a huge temple, ironically nicknamed the "Golden Tooth".
Alma mater of Yeltsin
Kirovsky district of Yekaterinburg is known, first of all, for the Ural Polytechnic Institute. Among the most famous graduates of UPI is the first Russian President Boris Yeltsin. In the same area there is an opera and ballet theater, on the stage of which Ivan Kozlovsky, Sergei Lemeshev and Irina Arkhipova sang, and one of the most striking monuments to those who died in Afghanistan and Chechnya "Black Tulip".
VISA beeps
The Verkh-Isetsky district is famous not only for the first metallurgical plant in Yekaterinburg called VIZ, but also for the Winged Guard Museum of the Airborne Forces. Among the expositions, the one dedicated to Colonel Leonid Khabarov, whose airborne battalion was the first to enter the belligerent Afghanistan, stands out. It is in the Verkh-Isetsky district that the Central Stadium, rebuilt just in time for the World Cup, is located and stands opposite the old city prison, about which Alexander Novikov also sang.
Sasha from Uralmash
The popular movie hero of the Great Patriotic War had the most direct relation to the then Sverdlovsk and its most industrial region. The Ordzhonikidze district of Yekaterinburg is popular not only as the first-born of the heavy industry of the USSR, Uralmashplant, but also as a monument of Soviet constructivism, the water-pressure White Tower, the top of which is a cylinder of a water tank raised to a height.
Border of two continents
Of course, with the completion of the city limits, the list of places where tourists are willingly taken does not end. Not far from the regional center there is a burial place of the executed royal family of Ganin Yama and a monument symbolizing the conditional border of Europe and Asia and which is also a must for newlyweds. And in winter, many townspeople go skiing from the Volchikha Mountain, which is 526 meters high.
