History of Yaroslavl

The history of Yaroslavl begins on a picturesque cape at the confluence of the Volga and the Kotorosl — where Strelka Park stretches today. According to legend, a pagan settlement called Medvezhy Ugol (“Bear Corner”) stood on this spot, and it was here that the Rostov prince Yaroslav Vladimirovich, later nicknamed the Wise, laid down a fortress destined to become one of the key cities of North-Eastern Rus. Although the founding date — 1010 — is considered conventional (chronicle mentions appeared later), it has been officially accepted since the 19th century, and the city counts its age from that year.

From Bear Corner to the capital of an appanage principality

The earliest mention of Yaroslavl in written sources dates to 1071. The “Tale of Bygone Years” describes an uprising of pagan sorcerers in the Rostov land and names the city in the list of settlements swept up in the turmoil. This chronicle passage implies that by the end of the 11th century Yaroslavl already existed as a notable fortress on the Volga route. The city took its name from its founder — Prince Yaroslav the Wise. And the famous bear with a poleaxe on the coat of arms is a tribute to the legend of the “fierce beast” that the prince slew when founding the city.

For its first two centuries Yaroslavl grew in the shadow of Rostov the Great as a frontier outpost and a trading post on the Volga. The turning point came at the beginning of the 13th century, when the city came under the rule of Prince Konstantin Vsevolodovich — son of Vsevolod the Big Nest. Under him, in the 1210s, the first stone buildings appeared in Yaroslavl, including the churches of the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Monastery. Within its walls Konstantin established the Grigoriev Zatvor — the first school in North-Eastern Rus and a library with scribes copying Greek and Slavic books.

In 1218 Yaroslavl became the capital of an independent appanage principality, inherited by Vsevolod Konstantinovich. This brief period of prosperity was cut short by the Mongol invasion. In 1238, during Batu Khan’s campaign, the city was sacked, and Vsevolod Konstantinovich fell in the Battle of the Sit River. The memory of resistance to the Horde was reinforced by another engagement — the Battle of Tugova Gora in 1257, when the Yaroslavl prince Konstantin Vsevolodovich led his retinue out against a punitive Mongol detachment. According to tradition, after the battle the hill beyond the Kotorosl received the name Tugova — the hill of “tuga,” of grief and mourning.

Over the next two centuries the Principality of Yaroslavl existed in close connection with the rising power of Moscow. Local princes gradually lost their independence, and in 1463 the last Yaroslavl prince, Alexander Fyodorovich, ceded his appanage to Grand Prince Ivan III. The annexation was peaceful: Yaroslavl joined the unified Russian state without war and immediately took its place among the leading Volga cities alongside Kostroma and Nizhny Novgorod.

The merchant century and the Time of Troubles

The 16th century made Yaroslavl one of the wealthiest cities in Russia. After Richard Chancellor’s expedition of 1553 opened the northern sea route to the mouth of the Northern Dvina, a stream of goods poured along the Volga. Yaroslavl proved to be a convenient transshipment point for Western European goods, as well as for Eastern wares from Persia and Central Asia. The city filled with merchant courts, foreign speech was heard in its markets, and under Ivan the Terrible the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Monastery — the city’s main fortress — acquired powerful stone walls and towers.

Yaroslavl played its fateful role in the country’s history during the Time of Troubles. In 1608–1609 the city was seized by supporters of the False Dmitry II, but it soon rose in rebellion and endured a long siege. And in the spring of 1612 the Second People’s Militia of Kuzma Minin and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky entered Yaroslavl. Here, on the Kotorosl Embankment, the militia was quartered from April through July. For four months the Kotorosl Embankment became the center of Russia: the “Council of All the Land” met here, coins were minted, and charters were dispatched across the country. From here the army marched on Moscow, liberated it from the Polish garrison, and thus brought the Time of Troubles to an end. In memory of those events, the Chapel of Our Lady of Kazan was built on the Kotorosl Embankment in 1997 — the very one that later appeared on the 1000-ruble banknote next to the monument to Yaroslav the Wise.

The 17th century became the “golden age” of Yaroslavl architecture. Local merchants — the Skripin, Guryev, and Nazariev families — competed in building churches that resembled neither those of Moscow nor those of Novgorod. They were distinguished by their height, their many domes, and their lavish decoration of tiles and frescoes. A powerful stimulus for stone construction came with the fire of 1658, after which the city began rapidly “dressing” itself in brick. The pinnacle of the Yaroslavl school was the Church of Elijah the Prophet, erected with funds from the Skripin family and painted by the masters Guriy Nikitin and Sila Savin. And in the Tolchkovo settlement rose the unique fifteen-domed Church of John the Baptist, whose majestic facade is also immortalized on the 1000-ruble banknote.

Provincial capital and factory town

By the 18th century Yaroslavl retained its status as one of the ten largest cities in Russia, but the center of Volga trade began to shift southward. With Peter I’s turn toward the Baltic, the northern trade route through Arkhangelsk lost its former importance, and Yaroslavl chose a new direction of development — industrial. In 1722 the merchant Maxim Zatrapeznov and the Dutchman Johann Tames founded a linen manufactory on the bank of the Kotorosl that became one of the largest in the country. Thus the Krasny Perekop district was born — the nucleus of the future textile industry.

The cultural face of the city in that era is linked to the name of Fyodor Volkov. In 1750 the son of a Yaroslavl merchant gathered a troupe of like-minded people in an ordinary tannery shed and gave the first public performances, which went down in history as the birth of Russian professional theater. Soon Volkov and his actors were summoned to the court of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, and the Yaroslavl stage has borne his name ever since. The present theater building, erected in 1911 in the neoclassical style, is the direct heir of that first troupe.

In 1777 Yaroslavl became a provincial capital, and a year later Catherine II approved its regular plan. Chaotic development gave way to a strict radial-ring grid of streets radiating from Ilyinskaya (now Sovetskaya) Square. This plan shaped the appearance of the historic center, which two centuries later was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list. At the same time the decayed fortifications of the Zemlyanoy Gorod were dismantled — only the Volzhskaya and Vlasyevskaya Towers have survived to our day.

Yaroslavl greeted the 19th century as an enlightened provincial center. In 1803, with funds from the philanthropist Pavel Demidov, the Higher School of Sciences was opened — the third higher educational institution in Russia after the Moscow and Vilnius universities. Later it was transformed into the Demidov Law Lyceum, cementing the city’s reputation as an intellectual center.

With the development of steamboat traffic and the opening in 1870 of the railway connecting the city with Moscow, Yaroslavl grew rapidly. On the banks of the Kotorosl rose the buildings of the Great Manufactory, with its own barracks for workers, a school and a hospital. By 1917 the city’s population had reached 130,000, and the industrial landscape was rounded out by tobacco, match, and white-lead factories. The final chord of the era was the laying down in 1916 of an automobile plant, which later became the legendary “Avtodizel.”

The 20th century: uprising, destruction, and recovery

The most tragic page in the city’s history came in July 1918. On July 6 an anti-Bolshevik uprising broke out in Yaroslavl under the command of Colonel Alexander Perkhurov — part of a coordinated attempt by the Union for the Defense of the Motherland and Freedom. The rebels held the center for sixteen days, until July 21. The suppression was carried out by artillery fire with the use of armored trains. The shells destroyed the Demidov Lyceum, the Spassky Barracks, dozens of churches, and up to a third of the city’s buildings. This blow changed the face of Yaroslavl more profoundly than any war of the previous centuries, and many of the architectural losses proved irreplaceable.

In the interwar years the city became the stage for the first Soviet industrialization. In 1932 a tire plant and SK-1 were launched here — the world’s first industrial complex for the production of synthetic rubber. They were followed by rubber-goods and engine plants, and the textile factories expanded. But the industrial leap was accompanied by ideological pressure: in 1937 the Assumption Cathedral on Strelka was blown up to make way for a park. Monastery walls were torn down for public squares, and churches were turned into clubs, warehouses, and archives.

During the Great Patriotic War Yaroslavl became a rear-area center. The engine, tire, and rubber-goods plants worked for the front, troop trains passed through the city, and the wounded were treated in hospitals. Although there were no direct battles within the city limits, German air raids in 1942–1943 claimed the lives of hundreds of residents. After the war, the development of the 1950s–1970s was pushed outside the historic center — to the left bank of the Volga and into new industrial districts. Thanks to this, the unique urban design of the Catherine era has been preserved to our day.

By the end of the 20th century Yaroslavl was gradually returning to its pre-revolutionary identity. In 1959 the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Monastery became the core of the Yaroslavl Museum-Reserve, and in 1993 John Mostoslavsky opened “Music and Time” on the Volzhskaya Embankment — the first private museum in post-Soviet Russia. And in 2005 the historic center of Yaroslavl was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, with the citation noting it as an outstanding example of Catherine II’s urban planning reform and the rare preservation of 17th-century church architecture.

Preparations for the city’s millennium in 2010 once again transformed the appearance of the center. The Assumption Cathedral was rebuilt on Strelka, a park was laid out with fountains and a stele, a Concert and Entertainment Center was opened on the left bank of the Kotorosl, and the Volkov Theater, the embankments, and dozens of facades in the historic quarters were restored. Since then Yaroslavl has lived a double life: it is a modern half-million-strong city with an automobile plant and a large oil refinery, and at the same time it remains one of the principal cities of the Golden Ring, where the streets still lead to churches erected by merchants three hundred years ago.