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There are 13 museums in Perm. The most famous is the Perm State Art Gallery. This is the first art museum in the Urals and one of the largest regional art museums in Russia.

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In fact, it “grew” from the art department of the Perm Scientific and Industrial Museum and began with paintings by the brothers Vasily and Peter Vereshchagin and several other Russian painters. Soon the collection was replenished with temple sculptures made of wood (“Perm gods”) and cult objects, and during the Great Patriotic War, the funds of the State Russian Museum and part of the funds of the State Tretyakov Gallery were evacuated here.

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Later, some of the exhibits remained in the gallery: there are works by Aivazovsky, Grabar, Kramskoy, Repin and Shishkin.

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The highlight of the gallery is kept almost under the dome – on the top floor there is a collection of wooden Orthodox sculpture collected in remote rural churches of the region. The exhibits at the same time resemble figurines of pagan idols and Orthodox saints. In the 18th century, the Church forbade their use in worship, but in the villages they ignored the ban, kept their saints and continued to carve their images.

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The first sculptures were discovered during an expedition in 1922. Soon the collection was replenished with gods from rural temples in the north of the region. The earliest exhibit in the gallery dates from the 17th century.

However, the gods-idols will not stay in the temple-gallery for long: for 30 years they have been trying to move it, and return the building to the Russian Orthodox Church. Today, a new location has been chosen for the gallery – the building should be built on the territory of the Shpagin Plant cultural space by the end of 2023, it will take some time to finish and move the exhibits. At the same place, the gallery will work only until September.

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You can also plunge into the past in the Museum of Perm Antiquities. In the history of the Earth, the so-called “Permian geological period” is singled out, and it is named so because geological traces of the era of the appearance of the progenitors of the first mammals were first discovered on the territory of the region.

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Various artifacts are collected in the museum: skeletons of prehistoric animals – estemmenosuchus and volkonskoita, a fossil grasshopper and the country’s longest (more than 3 meters) tusk of a trogontherian elephant, or steppe mammoth. There is an almost complete skeleton of a woolly mammoth – it was discovered in the west of the Perm Territory in 1927 year. According to scientists, it was an adult male. Probably, the animal fell into the swamp and could not get out to land.

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You can travel to the future and communicate with robots at the Promobot enterprise. It all started as a project of three students who decided to make a snow blower robot. Now the company is considered the largest manufacturer of service robots in Russia and Europe. Their robots are used as consultants, medical diagnosticians, promoters and concierges, and in the UAE they work in the police.

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The first robot of the company was assembled in 2013, among themselves it was called the “refrigerator”. He went around the trading floor of one of the local hypermarkets and sold roses. Today, these robots are in 43 countries around the world, and soon there may be a C4 model that can walk like a person.

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The city can be viewed from the water while traveling along the Kama, although such an acquaintance at a distance will be uninformative. Perm is worth it to go ashore. Moreover, sights are already concentrated at the river station: the famous art object “Happiness is not far off” has been installed on the embankment, the embankment itself has been renovated for the anniversary. Locals here dance, sing romances, play the harp and bagpipes.

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If you wish, you can take a ride on city buses or trams – ground transport is painted red and branded for the city’s anniversary. In addition, you can see the sights on the excursion bus “Perm 300 – the city on the Kama”.

What are posikunchiki and pistiki

Locals sometimes joke that the famous Permian accent, when the speaker hardly opens his mouth and because of this “swallows” vowels, appeared because of the harsh climate. Perhaps this has also influenced some traditional dishes: for example, guests here are treated to poshikunchiki – small pies, like fried dumplings, that can be eaten in two bites. Traditional fillings are meat, mushrooms or the horror of all meat-eaters – pistiki.

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Pistils are young, bitter shoots of horsetail, so spinach is mixed with them for taste. The “chip” of the dish is hidden in its name: the biscuits should be juicy, and the broth should flow out when biting.

The second no less popular national dish can be considered shanezhki – pies like cheesecakes stuffed with potatoes or boiled cereals. Now they are made from wheat flour, but the traditional ones were made with rye, so they tasted like Karelian wickets.

All these dishes can be tasted in restaurants specializing in the national Permian cuisine – “Chöskyt Kerku”, “Snail” and “Perm cuisine”.

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City Day in Perm is celebrated on June 12th. This year, on the occasion of the anniversary, performances by well-known Russian groups, solo performers and children’s groups are planned, theatrical performances will be held in different parts of the city, and active citizens will be presented with jubilee banknotes specially made for the holiday.

Yekaterinburg

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Modern Yekaterinburg is both the capital of the Urals and the capital of constructivism: a city that now has its own Hermitage and still lacks St. Catherine’s Cathedral. Here the royal family died and the first president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, was born. It is one of seven Russian cities that has a metro.

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You can get from Perm to Yekaterinburg by “swallow” – the journey takes about 4.5 hours, you arrive in the city in the morning.

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Here, as in any other metropolis, there are many hotels: there are chain hotels – Hyatt and Novotel, notable – “Vysotsky” and “Residence”. Some are located in buildings recognized as monuments of federal significance – for example, you can stay at the Bolshoi Ural Hotel or a mini-hotel in the House of Soviets.

Colored tourist routes of Yekaterinburg

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The first impression of the city can be obtained by walking along the central street of Lenin Avenue. Seeing along the way the neoclassical building of the city administration, the water tower on Plotinka, the constructivist buildings of the Communications House and the Press House, the famous Chekist Town, the building of the headquarters of the Ural Military District and the huge communal house of Gostyazhpromural the size of an entire block.

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In addition, there are several pedestrian routes in the city, divided into lines. Each of them has its own color and permeates the city, thematically uniting sights. The most famous is the “red line”. This is a 9-kilometer circular route through the historic center of the city. Walking along it, you can admire postcard views of the rotunda, the City Pond and Sevastyanov’s house, take a look at the building of the government of the Sverdlovsk region and the house-ship of the Dynamo sports complex from afar.

There are also blue, yellow and purple lines – they are also laid along the sights related to the same theme. For example, the blue one shows the route of Christian pilgrims and is somehow connected with the execution of the royal family. The yellow one was created for tourists on scooters and bicycles, and the purple one is dedicated to street art and objects of the popular Stenograffia festival.

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The Vysotsky and Iset skyscrapers will be visible from almost anywhere in the city. A walk through the city center can be replaced by a trip on the city trolleybus or tram.

Yekaterinburg – the capital of constructivism

The city, which consisted of low wooden houses, began to change its appearance slowly in the early 20th century: a construction boom swept the city in the 1920s, when people poured into the region during the first five-year plans. In the place of compact Yekaterinburg, a modern socialist Sverdlovsk was to grow. Architects created a new city in the spirit of that time: instead of temples, wooden houses and merchant mansions, buildings in the constructivist style began to appear. Everything had to be ruled by symmetry and logic. Women were freed from kitchen slavery, so there were no kitchens in the “new buildings”, and bathrooms were not equipped everywhere either. In the future, this will become a big problem for the owners of such apartments. But in the 1930s, they believed in the victory of socialism and life under the new rules, so unusual houses appeared in the city.

For example, the “NKVD Housing Complex”, or the “House of the Chekist”, consists of two parts: a 4-storey building in the shape of the letter “p” and an adjoining 12-storey building, which until the 60s was the tallest residential building in the city. From above, the house resembles one of the symbols of Soviet power – a sickle.

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The commune house of Gostyazhpromural was just as advanced. A huge structure of eight buildings connected with each other by transitions was supposed to become a real city within a city. In the house itself, in addition to apartments, there were household premises, a kindergarten, a hospital, a library and a restaurant. The apartments were also unusual: in some buildings they built small apartments with conveniences on the floor, and in the four outer buildings two-level apartments appeared.

Today, on the site of the hospital, an art cluster “L52” has been set up, the building is being gradually restored and those who wish are taken on excursions.

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The fashion for constructivism was followed in everything, even an unusual water tower was installed in the new district of Uralmash: on a hill where a church would have been built earlier, an alien-looking structure appeared with round windows, an observation deck and a red star on crown. It was called so – the white tower, or “Mona Lisa of Soviet constructivism.”

“For avant-garde architecture, a serious question arose: we are creating new cities, we need to completely distance ourselves from the old and capitalist. Question: what are we going to put on the hills? It is logical that a water tower should be placed on a high point. But it can be made with a simple cylinder, but you can make it such a curious object,” says tour guide Dmitry Moskvin.

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The tower was not used for its intended purpose for long – the lake that fed it quickly dried up, and some time later it was simply abandoned. However, enthusiasts are trying to save the tower and breathe life into this place: they conduct tours here and hope that the authorities will give the local Mona Lisa another chance.

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The Hermitage employees also took care of saving art during the Great Patriotic War: in fact, within a week, exhibits from Leningrad were packed and sent to the rear, to Sverdlovsk. In 2021, in the same building where famous paintings and art objects were brought during the war, the Hermitage-Ural Museum was opened (Vayner St., 11). True, now it is equipped with the latest technology. In the neighboring building there is a depository, restoration workshops and lecture halls.

By the way, the director of the new museum, Nikita Korytin, runs a telegram channel about the life of the Hermitage-Ural and shows the museum behind the scenes, preparations for exhibitions and work in workshops.

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The Urals are often associated with the tales of Pavel Bazhov and the tale of the mistress of the Copper Mountain. The region is rich in minerals, and local craftsmen make real masterpieces from stone. You can see them in the stone museum.

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There are several similar museums in Yekaterinburg. Denisov-Uralsky. Here you can see not only stones (some are allowed to be touched) and crafts made from them, but also try your hand at stone-cutting during a master class.

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In the 19th century, gold miners accidentally discovered wooden fragments 70 km from Yekaterinburg. Lines were carved on them and human faces were depicted, and when scientists put this puzzle together, a five-meter Shigir idol appeared before them. Many later managed to establish its approximate age – more than 12 thousand years. That is, this figure is almost three times older than the Egyptian pyramids and may be the oldest wooden idol in the world. Together with the giant, they discovered smaller idols – all of them are kept in the Sverdlovsk Museum of Local Lore and are worth seeing.