Stavropol Krai Map

Stavropol Krai, commonly being addressed simply as Stavropol Territory, is a constituent entity of Russia and a federal subject of the Russian Federation located in central Ciscaucasia in the Northern slopes of the Greater Caucasus. With an area of 66,160 square kilometres, it is number forty-five in area in Russia among the eighty-five federal subjects and also serves to provide the vital connection between the Russian interior plains and the multiethnic cultural mosaic of the North Caucasus republics of the south.

It has its administrative centre, the city of Stavropol, which was established as a military outpost back in 1777 and today has a population of more than 430,000 people, with the total population of 2,907,593 people as per the 2021 census. With the gift of chernozem (“black earth”) soils, with a network of rivers, the Kuban, Terek and the Kuma, as well as possessing great natural gas reserves, discovered in the early decades of the twentieth century, as a whole Stavropol Krai has both an industry relying on energy sources and an intensive agricultural economy.

History

The archaeology shows the emergence of humans on the lands of the current Stavropol Krai in the supposition of the fourth millennium BC, and a series of Scythian and Sarmatian nomads in the following millennium left behind a trail of kurgan burials and cities across the steppe. Between the seventh and the tenth centuries, the Khazar Khaganate controlled one of the most profitable trade routes in the region, taking tribute from local tribes and creating trade linkages between Europe and Asia.

As the influence of the Khazar settled, the principalities of the Alanics came to the surface only to be subdued by the horde of Mongols in the late thirteenth century, which destroyed the structures and opened decades of discontinuity of rule under the different successor Khanates of various and local warlords. It was in the mid-sixteenth century, after Astrakhan had been defeated by Ivan IV in 1556, that the ambitions of Moscow became strongly oriented to taking the North Caucasus, which set the stage for the gradual Russian appropriation of Ciscaucasia.

Formal Russian colonisation of the region did not start until Catherine II commissioned the building of the Azov-Mozdok defensive line in 1777 to defend the frontiers in the south against intrusions by the Ottoman Empire and tribes in the mountains. November 22, the same year 1860, saw the erection at the base of the Mashuk Mountain the fortress of Stavropolskaya or literally, the city of the cross, that took its name from a fallen officer whose tomb was denoted by a cross placed by the building.

At first, a wooden stockade, guarded by a small garrison consisting of retired United States soldiers and Cossack immigrants who had been induced by imperial bribes to settle on the land, the fort soon drew in merchants, craftsmen and free-land colonists. By 1785, Stavropol had become one of six uezd (county) towns in the newly established Caucasus Governorate, where its dual status as military stronghold and trading centre would be secured.

In the course of the first part of the nineteenth century, when Russian forces moved further into the Caucasus, Stavropol became a base of military campaigns into the Caucasus in a series of long-term conflicts. A reform in 1822 raised it to the capital of the Caucasus Oblast and occasioned the construction of neoclassical public works, Orthodox cathedrals and a road network linking the town to new outposts farther south. Political dissidents, and Decembrists who were exiled here left memoirs with colourful records of the harsh beauty and tough mountain people here. Literary heroes such as Mikhail Lermontov sent to the Caucasian line during the 1830s eternalised local folklore and scenery in poetry, hurling Stavropol into the Russian cultural consciousness.

The Revolution of 1917 destroyed the imperial establishments and temporarily created the North Caucasus Soviet Republic, which was actually recreated in 1924 as the North Caucasus Krai. More administrative reshuffles then followed, and it was renamed Ordzhonikidze Krai in 1937 and after it was renamed Stavropol Krai on January 12, 1943, during the German occupation of World War II that lasted initially between August 1942, and Soviet counteroffensives in early 1943 left a trail of ruination. The decades after the war brought a phase of rapid construction: Nevinnomyssk gas pipelines hit Moscow in 1956, huge chemical and thermal power plants appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, and the neat fields were seeded using tractors on the fertile plains to create the modern industrial-agrarian economy which exists to this day.

Culture

Stavropol Krai has an equally diverse cultural landscape, considering that its cultural heritage spans more than ten centuries, marked by the presence of over thirty cultural groups. The ethnic Russians make up almost four out of five of the population, followed by the Armenians (4.7 per cent), Dargins (2 per cent), Romani (1.3 percent), Greeks and Nogais (0.8 percent each), and a patchwork of the North Caucasian peoples that make up the rest. The Kuban Cossacks founders were horsemen who were invited to the western plains to defend the imperial frontiers in the eighteenth century and still preserve the rich tradition of equestrian skills, folk songs, embroidered cloth, and the war dance, Lezginka, a form of martial dance that combines high kicking and stomping that resembles the primitive war drums.

Stavropol is not complete without its recognised mineral-water spas, so no cultural discussion is updated without them. Starting with the first state-sponsored sanatorium, opened at Zheleznovodsk in 1803, the resort towns of Pyatigorsk, Yessentuki and Kislovodsk soon swelled into health-tourism capitals of the Russian nobility and Russian intelligentsia.

Literary geniuses Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, amongst others, went to find the inspiration as well as the healing in the pine-scented air and collonaded walks. That tradition is followed in the present day by much of the present-day visitors, who combine the therapeutic mud bath and balneotherapy with cultural attractions: outdoor concerts are held in the park covered pavilions, readings of poems are performed in the avenues lined with laurels, and the seasonal fairs, on which local traditional dress and crafts and Cossack horse games are on display.

Food culture is the union between Slavic eats and Caucasian spiciness. Village kitchens also make borscht and solyanka, which is complemented by sunflowers and beets in nearby fields, or the cuisine with mountain influences such as the khinkali dumplings, shashlik skewers bathed in walnut oil and spices, and pomegranate-colored sauces shaken off neighbouring republics. Harvest fairs finish the grain season, and traditional treats are honey, cheese and home-made fruit brandies. Meanwhile, the urban theatres, galleries and the university programs of Stavropol, particularly in the fields of agronomy and Caucasian studies, are fostering the artistic expression and scholarship in the area, so that the multifaceted heritage of the region will continue being dynamic and prospect-oriented.

Language

The only official language of the government, education and the media of Stavropol Krai is Russian, which is taught in schools, starting in the primary school, and is used as lingua franca in relation to its multinational population. However, most minorities still hold their ancestral languages in terms of personal and cultural arenas. On its part, North Caucasian languages, such as Lezgin, Dargin, Chechen, and Ossetian, whose dialects are full of twists and turns and possess rich inflexions, are handed over to younger generations by speakers who use church services and folklore groups as a vehicle.

Nogai Turkic, the language of common use among steppe merchants, is still in use, along with Armenian and Romani dialects spread by immigrant flows in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bilingual teaching and other cultural affiliations do their best to keep these languages alive, but the dominance of Russian in the life of the people is also a guarantee that this city will not be divided by the lack of one medium, despite the bountiful chorus of multicultural voices.

Geography

Sitting on the border of the mountain and the plain, Stavropol Krai covers the northern cuts of the Greater Caucasus and the wavy foreland or the Stavropol Upland. To the south, the mountains rise over 4,000 meters--to a peak of 4,046 meters at Mount Dombay-Ulgen--with deciduous and coniferous woods covering low slopes and then replaced by alpine meadows and craggy mountains. Meltwater draining these highlands flows into the tributaries of the river Terek, Kuma and Kuban, cutting green valleys, springs of which, rich in iron, sodium, and hydrogen carbonate, supply health resorts since the Tsarist era.

To the north, mountains give way to the fertile black-earth plains of the Fore-Caucasus, of silvery-smiling wheat, sunflowers, cornfields, to the horizon, and of birches, oaks, and poplars. What is beyond them, there is the Nogay Steppe, a borderland where chernozem is reduced to sandy soils, semidesert plants reign, and transhumant shepherds drive herds between summer and winter grazinglands.

Climatologically, the krai falls largely within the hot-summer humid continental zone. July temperatures average between 20 °C and 25 °C on the plains, while January lows dip from –2 °C to –6 °C, with extremes recorded as low as –35 °C and as high as 40 °C. The rainfall accumulation is between 400 and 600 mm per year, with the highest in spring and early summer, with occasional droughts and late freezes threaten agriculture. The natural resources are plentiful: in addition to productive gas fields in the vicinity of Nevinnomyssk (first exploited in 1910), the foreland has reserves of limestone, gypsum and clays, which supply the cement, chemical and ceramics industries. Fresh fish farming, irrigation canals and eco-tourism projects based on the interaction of the steppe and mountain ecology also benefit the patchwork of the rivers and reservoirs in the region.

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