Kaluga, Russia – Map, Location & Regional Overview

The 46 oblasts of the Russian Federation to which Kaluga Oblast belongs host Kaluga as the capital city, which occupies the territory of around 170 square kilometres on the central, East European Plain. The city of Kaluga is about 150 kilometres to the southwest of Moscow on the Oka River. However, the economic and cultural profile of the region is strikingly diverse in harmony with its size.

History

Archaeological excavations identify that as far back as the Palaeolithic, or 30,000 years ago, human groups began exploiting the riverside terraces and forested hills of the region. Seasonal camps like hunter-gatherers, fishing and hunting elk and aurochs are reflected by Mesolithic and Neolithic settlements around the current Maloyaroslavets and Kozelsk. By the 6th to 8th centuries CE, these wildwoods were inhabited by East Slavic tribes, mainly the Vyatichi, who farmed by slash-and-burn, reared livestock, and were rudimentary metalworkers. They built strong towns or gorods, frequently on elevated heights of the rivers, and left behind them lines of fortification still to be traced by modern archaeologists in the neighbourhoods of Serensk and Kopal.

Kaluga lands straddled a disputed border region between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the rising Principality of Moscow between the 12th and 15th centuries. The town of Kozelsk originated in 1146 and is famous for its armed opposition to the Mongol invasion of 1238. Mosalsk, Serensk (later Spas-Serensk) and Vorotynsk were also born as secure outposts protecting forests hiding raiders in the Litovsk-Polish-Tatar tussle. Grand Prince Ivan III (1480) was confronted by Khan Ahkmat on the frozen Ugga River by the city of Kaluga in a confrontation, which brought an end to the so-called Tatar yoke over the Muscovite realm. This turning point not only marked where the unification Russian state was directionally born, but it also represented control over the territory, ruling in the region, and the incorporation of their rivers and forests into the Muscovite state.

Kaluga lands were absorbed into the huge Moscow Governorate under the reforms in 1708 by Peter the Great, who reorganised the guberniyas of the Russian Empire. A decade later, they were incorporated into an upstart Kaluga Province (1719), though it was not until a decree in 1776 by Catherine II that Kaluga became the seat of its own viceroyalty, full of codified administrative roles, new forms of taxation, and expanding networks of postal routes. Inspired by the reign of Paul I in 1796, the Kaluga Viceroyalty was reorganised into Kaluga Governorate, the regional centre of governing that, although temporal boundaries were later adjusted, remained stable until post-Soviet times.

Later, the German invasion of 1812 placed Kaluga back in the limelight as it became a huge supply base to Russian armies, and the defeat of the Grande Armée at Maloyaroslavets sent Napoleon straight back to France on a ravaged retreat route. The most glorious person in the region was Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, who was born in 1892, a provincial schoolteacher. He registered principles of rocketry and space flight in the world of mathematics in the small house wherein he resided, initiating the Soviet space program with seeds.

Land redistribution and nationalisation of factories were introduced through the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Kaluga Governorate was abolished in 1929 and subdivided into smaller oblasts; in July 1944, the Soviet government decreed the modern Kaluga Oblast, consolidating most of the pre-revolutionary districts. In late 1941, the Battle of Moscow took place, where German soldiers took over, occupying some parts of Kaluga city and other neighbouring towns, causing immense destruction of infrastructure and historic buildings.

Culture

The religious territory of Kaluga is characterised by the presence of Orthodox monasteries, the history of which dates back centuries. Optina Pustyn near Kozelsk was famous in the nineteenth century because of its startsy--monastic elders whose advice attracted the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky to Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Solovyov. Among the examples is the Pafnutiev Borovsky Monastery, founded in the late 14th century by St. Pafnutiy Borovsky, which became a seat of theological studies, or, further afield, the Spaso-Uspenski Convent outside the city of Kaluga, which rebuilt its stone cathedral of the 17th century, which had been damaged in wartime. Monastery grounds are regularly packed with tens of thousands of pilgrims during the Feast of the Transfiguration and Dormition, with the liturgical singing that supports old crafts as well as icon-painting ateliers stimulated as a result.

The Tsiolkovsky house-museum in the city of Kaluga not only writes the history of the theory of rocket science, but also arranges exhibitions of 19th and early-20th-century Russian art, connecting space fantasies with national creativity. The central drama theatre of Kaluga was founded in 1777; it produces the drama of Gogol and Chekhov, as well as the drama of avant-garde playwrights; the repertoire incorporates the evolution of Russian drama. The annual Maloyaroslavets Battle Re-enactment (in October since the year 2000) and Kozelsk Byzantine Readings (in summer since 2009) festivals mix history and historicism, people sing and compete in folk song performances, experts give seminars on open-air iconography, and the connections between academic scholarship and the living tradition are established.

The Maloyaroslavets and Sukhinichi rural artisans have maintained characteristic carving motifs: complex geometric figures and floral decorations stylised in appearance, which are used to decorate iconostases of churches and household items. There is local ceramic art around Kozelsk, a polychrome tile and pots made on centuries-old kilns, and there are the Ulyanovo weavers with their rhombic-patterned shawls and belts portraying a medieval Slavic loom. Villagers of the Protva River spend Kupala Night every June having bonfires, making wreaths, and singing chorally river-blessing hymns. In September, there are harvest fairs, with honey tasting, buckwheat pancakes, and scything and threshing demonstrations, a complete experience of the agrarian past of the area.

In addition to the legacy left by Tsiolkovsky, the artefacts of the Kaluga Regional Museum of Local Lore help to retrieve the lives of the peasants and townsfolk in the context of time are provided with the range ranging from prehistoric axes and 19th 19th-century samovars. A tiny Golden Goose film festival in the city of Kaluga highlights the independent Russian filmmakers, and the Obninsk Science and Art Centre combines digital art installations with talks by cosmonauts and astrophysicists. Chamber and quartet music lovers come together every year in the Kaluga Philharmonic Chamber Music Series, which invites Moscow-based elite quartets and finest soloists to play in 19th-century concert halls that have been restored and made regular parts of the lives of locals.

Language

The only official language of Kaluga city is Russian, spoken by more than 93 per cent of the population, as stated in the 2010 Census. The local speech is the Central Russian dialect zone with characteristic speech features as so called okanye. Although minorities, including Ukrainians, Armenians, Tatars, and Belarusians, preserve languages in their families, by being immersed in Russian at school, in the media, and in the administration, legacy languages have mostly been reduced to casual use.

Geography

Kaluga lies between two lowland uplifts on the East European Plain, the Smolensk-Moscow Upland in the northwest (with the hill highest in this area in the region around 279 m above sea level) and the Central Russian Upland in the southeast (up to 275 m). There exists between them a mosaic of rolling hills, flat sunken valleys and river terraces. The soils are mainly deep, black soil rich in organic matter, the chernozems, alternating with lighter soils of the podzolic variety beneath pine-birch woodland. About 46 percent of the Kaluga oblast is covered by woodlands with mixed forests of spruce, pine, oak and birch. Its territory is more than a third (three eighths) agricultural lands filled with various grain crops, potatoes, flax, and fodder crops, and the rest is a plain, wetlands, and the city.

The hydrographic system of the city is centred upon the Oka River, one of the main tributaries of the Volga River, running westwards along the northern border of the region of Kaluga. The largest tributaries: Ugra, Protva and Zhizdra, meander among the forest belts and inundated meadows, forming beaver, otter and migratory waterfowl habitat. The smaller rivers and streams (in excess of 2,000) drain into tens of artificial reservoirs operated as irrigation reservoirs, flood control reservoirs and recreation reservoirs. An abundance of carbon is stored in scrupulous waterlogged peat bogs and pockets of fenland, which are typified by sphagnum mosses, marsh orchids and rare fenland butterflies in the ValdaySmolensk depression.

The climate is humid, temperate continental with cold and snowy winters and warm, rather humid summers. The lowest temperatures in January range from around +11 °C, on the northeast border of the country, to +8 °C, on the southwest, and the highest ones are + 18 °C, on average, to +20 °C, in July. Frosts are typical of early November to late March, and the growing period is about 215 days. Rainfall is evenly distributed between rainfall and snow, 690 mm on average, inside sources are 20 km away border with Moscow Oblast to 826 as high as in the uplands. Autumn encounters a lot of fog and hoar frost, forming a crystalline scenery of the rivers.

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