Hotels in Tomsk

Old Tomsk is compact: it takes about five minutes to walk from Lenin Square and the Epiphany Cathedral down to the Tom embankment, and a little longer to reach Resurrection Hill. The same circle holds the museums, the Grand Concert Hall and the 19th-century merchant mansions that sit side by side with modern shopping centers. Stay here if this is your first time in the city and you want to get by without a car or buses — the trade-off is a busy avenue outside the window rather than silence.

Resurrection Hill is an open-air museum you can walk through: the Tomsk history museum stands at the top with a view over the lower town, and the lanes around it still hold carved wooden houses from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The walk down to Lenin Square takes five to seven minutes, but the mood up here is entirely different — quieter and slower, with carved window frames outside the glass instead of shop displays. A good choice if wooden architecture is the reason you came and you don't mind the climb back up.

The main buildings of TSU and TPU stretch along Lenin Avenue south of the square — from University Grove down to Lagerny Sad, with the Siberian State Medical University and the architecture university close by. People book here for exam sessions, for conferences or to visit a student in the dorms: the streets around are full of student cafés and secondhand bookshops on Nikitina, and the Tom embankment is a few minutes away on foot. The quarter runs on the campus calendar, so for a large conference it pays to look for a room well ahead.

The top end in Tomsk is narrow: the city has just two five-star hotels, and they stand a ten-minute walk from each other right by the pedestrian center. That is enough for an anniversary, an important guest or a round of talks, but there is not much to choose between — rooms on the dates you need go about a month in advance. If both are full, the nearest substitutes are the four-star and small boutique hotels downtown, where the level of service is much the same.

The logic is simple: the farther from Lenin Square, the cheaper — though in Tomsk "farther" means no more than fifteen minutes by bus. The most affordable rates here come not from hostels but from ordinary small hotels with double rooms and a bare minimum of services. It works if you just need a proper night's sleep between a train and a morning appointment, or want to stretch the budget across a long trip around Siberia.

Apartments in Tomsk are concentrated on Tverskaya, Frunze and Belinskogo and in the blocks near Lenin Avenue — ordinary city flats with a kitchen, sized for three or four people. Families with children take them, and so do teams arriving for a conference: one apartment works out cheaper than two hotel rooms, and you can cook dinner yourselves. The drawback is that there is usually no staffed front desk, so check-in time and the key handover are arranged with the host in advance.

Krasnoarmeyskaya and the streets around it are quiet residential blocks off the tourist routes, with Lagerny Sad and its bluff above the Tom and the Polytechnic buildings close at hand. Parking is noticeably easier here, which is why the area suits people who came by car or are staying a week on business. Lenin Square is a short ride up Lenin Avenue, and on foot it turns into a walk past the university buildings.