The History of Kislovodsk

The name Kislovodsk grew out of a simple folk nickname. Locals called the carbonated spring in the valley of the Olkhovka River the “sour well” and the water itself “sour.” From that everyday description came the name that later spread to the fortress, the settlement, and finally the town. The Turkic peoples of the Caucasus had known narzan long before the Russians arrived and called it “nartsane” — “the drink of the Nart heroes.” That word entered Russian, in slightly altered form, as the name for the mineral water.

Archaeologists have found traces of settled life in the surrounding area going back several millennia. The Koban culture of the 13th–12th centuries BC left its dolmens and burial mounds here. Later the valley was inhabited by the Sarmatians, and then by the Alans, who built a powerful state in the upper reaches of the Kuban. By the end of the 18th century, however, the land around the spring stood empty: the mountain-ringed basin drew little more than occasional highlanders and rare travelers. The town’s history in the usual sense began only when the borders of the Russian Empire reached this far.

The “Kislye Vody” fortress and the first Russian visitors

On March 7, 1803, Alexander I signed a rescript ordering the construction of a fortification at the narzan spring. The decision was not driven by resort ambitions but by military and administrative needs: Russia’s southern Caucasus line required strongpoints, and a site by the healing waters looked convenient from two angles at once — strategic and sanitary. Between June and October of that year, soldiers of the 16th Jäger Regiment built an earthen fortress here, with towers and ramparts, which was given the name “Kislye Vody” (“Sour Waters”). That date is considered the official year of Kislovodsk’s founding.

At first the garrison lived in isolation: officers drank narzan from a wooden well-house built directly over the spring, and the first “patients” arrived rarely and almost always with a military escort — outside the ramparts lay foreign, restless country. The situation changed in the 1820s, when General Alexei Yermolov became viceroy of the Caucasus. In 1823, on his orders, a resort park was laid out around the spring: oaks, lindens, and poplars were planted, and the first paths were leveled. Those plantings became the nucleus of the future Kislovodsk park.

Around the same time, Russian society began to make its way to the fortress. In 1820 Alexander Pushkin visited Kislye Vody. He stopped in on his journey with General Rayevsky, drank the narzan, and described the spring in his letters. In 1829 the poet returned and stayed at the house of the landowner Rebrov — the settlement’s first two-story stone building, built in 1823 to a design by the Bernardazzi brothers. That house later became a literary address: Mikhail Lermontov lived in it, and it was here that the author of *A Hero of Our Time* “housed” the novel’s characters — Princess Mary, Pechorin, and Grushnitsky. And Ring Mountain from the same novella remains one of the city’s chief landmarks to this day.

From settlement to resort

By the mid-19th century Kislovodsk’s status as a fortress had lost its meaning. The front line had moved farther south, and patients from St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Tiflis were arriving in the valley in ever greater numbers. Houses, shops, and small eateries began to appear around the fortress walls — the Kislovodsk sloboda was taking shape. On August 24, 1836, the Kurortny Boulevard opened, the town’s main pedestrian axis. It linked the spring to the park and thus gave the public an ideal place to promenade.

The great architectural breakthrough of the era came in 1848–1858. The Caucasus viceroy, Prince Mikhail Vorontsov, commissioned the English architect Samuel Upton to build a stone gallery over the narzan spring. Upton took Giuseppe Bernardazzi’s idea as his starting point but reimagined it in the spirit of English Gothic. The building was designed in the shape of an enormous key — an elegant play on words, alluding to the Russian name of the spring (klyuch means both “key” and “spring”). After ten years of construction, the Narzan Gallery appeared before the public in the form we know today. The spring had found a worthy setting, and the settlement had acquired its recognizable face.

The population grew quickly. The census recorded that between 1881 and 1891 the number of residents rose from 1,551 to about 6,000 — almost a fourfold increase in a decade. The main push for development came from the railway: on May 17, 1894, regular train service opened on the Mineralnye Vody — Kislovodsk line. The Tiflis post road became a thing of the past, and the journey from the capital to the waters shrank from weeks to a day and a half. By 1895 the sloboda had electric lighting, a railway station, and a Kursaal — the center of social and musical life. The resort had finally shed its “campaign” character and become a proper town.

The town at the turn of the century

In 1901 Kislovodsk adopted the European fashion for health walking: the country’s first marked therapeutic-walking trails appeared here. Doctor Nikolai Oblonsky, a close friend of Anton Chekhov, drew on the methods of the German professor Ertel and laid out a trail along the slopes of Sosnovaya Gorka. Route No. 1 is still a recognizable thread of resort life today — and, at the same time, the first trail in the country on which walking became a full-fledged medical procedure.

On June 25, 1903, the centenary of the local fortress, a decree of Nicholas II granted the Kislovodsk sloboda town status. By the 1910s it had become a modern resort with well-developed infrastructure: hotels, bathhouses, a printing office, a telegraph, and running water. In 1912 the Colonnade was unveiled at the entrance to the park — a white semicircular gallery marking the centenary of the Russian victory in the Patriotic War of 1812. That monument still serves as the park’s ceremonial gate.

On the eve of the Revolution, Kislovodsk had become a magnet for the metropolitan elite. Actors, doctors, engineers, and officials came here “for the whole season.” Fyodor Chaliapin was a frequent guest: he gave concerts in the Kursaal and the Narzan Gallery, and in the summer of 1917 he rented an Art Nouveau mansion from General Abrezov. That building, designed by the architect Emmanuel Khodzhaev, is known today as the literary and musical museum named after the great singer.

Revolution, the Soviet resort, and occupation

The Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War caught Kislovodsk at the peak of its pre-revolutionary flowering. The property of private dachas and sanatoriums was confiscated, and their owners were driven out or shot. The idea of an “all-Russian resort,” however, survived: on May 26, 1925, the government granted Kislovodsk the status of a resort of nationwide significance, and in the 1920s and 1930s more than forty sanatoriums opened in the town and its surroundings. Almost all of them rose on the sites of former mansions and rental houses. On December 2, 1936, electric trains began running on the Mineralnye Vody — Kislovodsk section, turning the trip from Minvody into an almost suburban ride.

The hardest months came during the Great Patriotic War. In the summer of 1942 the Wehrmacht broke through into the Northern Caucasus, and from August 1942 to January 1943 Kislovodsk remained under German occupation. The town was not reduced to rubble — the front passed it by — but it lost some of its residents, including its Jewish population, and most of its sanatorium property. On January 11, 1943, Kislovodsk was liberated by the troops of the North Caucasus Front. By the summer of that same year several sanatoriums were already receiving the wounded, and the resort itself was operating as a rear-line hospital.

From the postwar years to today

The town’s postwar recovery moved quickly. By the 1950s and 1960s Kislovodsk’s present-day resort topography had taken shape: the boulevard, the park with its six terrenkurs, and the dense belt of sanatoriums in Rebrova Balka. On October 14, 1980, the town was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, First Class, for its contribution during the war — official recognition of its enormous role in saving the wounded.

The post-Soviet years passed without catastrophe, but also without much shine: some sanatoriums fell into disrepair, others passed into private hands. The narzan and the park endured, and it was around them that reconstruction began in the 2010s. In 2016 the Kurortny Park was granted the status of Kislovodsk National Park of federal significance. Its 965 hectares and network of terrenkurs stretching more than 24 kilometers cemented Kislovodsk’s standing not only as a resort but as a major nature-conservation center.

Today about 126,000 people live in Kislovodsk, and it remains the leading balneological health resort of the Caucasian Mineral Waters. Over two centuries, the carbonated spring in the Olkhovka valley has traveled from a modest source to a fortress, a settlement, and a network of sanatoriums, becoming a modern city where a national park begins right behind the famous Colonnade.