Voronezh Map, Russia

Voronezh is a city on the banks of the Voronezh River upstream of its merger with the Don, in the fertile Black Earth country of southwest Russia. The city was established as a fortress in 1586 and grew as the administrative centre of Voronezh Oblast, as well as an important hub in the M4 Don highway and the Southeastern Railway. It can be described as more than a million, where it mixes onion-domed cathedrals, Soviet-era residences, contemporary offices and broad parks with high-rise buildings. Its location in a strategic place and fertile soil have influenced the city to become a military fortification and a cultural bridge to the extent of about four hundred years.

History

Much earlier, when the construction of the fortress began, Slavic peoples lived in the Central Russian Upland river valleys and oak forests. The archaeology shows in the eighth century to the eleventh century traces of the hillforts and riverine settlements where people settled to exploit the plentiful chernozem soils and fish resources. The earliest mention of Voronezh is during the Medieval chronicles of 1177, during which a Ryazan prince escapes there following a defeat. Its location on the outskirts of the Muscovite realm proved it a perfect base of commerce and protection against the raids of nomads in the south.

Tsar Feodor I constructed a timberstone kremlin in 1586 to safeguard the Muravsky Trail against Crimean and Nogai Tatar raids. The new fortification was under the leadership of Governor Semyon Saburov, dwelling around which was a small settlement. By the early seventeenth century, the city of Voronezh grew to become a local administrative centre, including a wooden church and weekly markets. The inhabitants survived the Time of Troubles, changing their loyalty several times: first supporting False Dmitri II, and then again reasserting their loyalty to the Shuisky regime as they felt their lives seriously threatened.

Voronezh attained wider meaning in the late seventeenth century when sandy banks were chosen by Peter the Great to anchor the first naval fleet in Russia. During 1696-1698, the Imperial yard built dozens of ships, such as the flagship Goto Predestinatsia, intended to fight against the Ottomans at Azov. Peter was there for more than a year, conducting overseer activity of construction and turning the city into an intermediate military station. Despite great fires in 1703 and 1748, which destroyed much of the town, the urban plan of Catherine II in 1774 installed a controlled street pattern and new civic squares, which reoriented Voronezh as the centre of provincial importance.

During the nineteenth century, the city of Voronezh had a stable economic and cultural development. River power was used in textile mills, butter works, tanneries, of leather works, and the merchant houses financed schools, hospitals, and libraries. By 1868, the Moscow Railway connected the city to Moscow itself with a vital connection to national markets due to the black earth grain farms. In 1871, the railway to Rostov-on-Don followed. At the same time, a need to create a permanent theatre troupe rose, and the discussion of serfdom, education and the place of Russia in Europe developed with the help of personal salons, developing a new intelligentsia.

In 1905, a Revolutionary impulse ran through Voronezh and induced strikes, demonstrations and violence. In 1928, the city became the administrative centre of the Central Black Earth Region after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The 1930s witnessed the construction of new buildings by industrialisation impetuses that constructed machinery and aeroplane plants, and Stalinist architects transformed the downtown with huge administrative buildings and cultural palaces. Voronezh rapidly benefited the Soviet desires to employ southern agriculture and to create a modern republic of worker.

World War II struck devastating blows when the German Sixth Army reached even the outskirts of Voronezh in June 1942. Hard battles on the riverbanks slowed Axis attacks on Stalingrad, hence keeping the enemy divisions busy. By January 1943, the Soviet counteroffensives had retaken the city, although 90 per cent of the buildings were ruined. The process of reconstruction was started at once; architects started to restore the baroque churches and reconstruct housing estates. The industrial growth after the war produced tire plants, as well as machine-tool plants, and the Voronezh Aviation Plant produced the Tu-144 supersonic airliner and the Il-86 wide-body jet.

Culture

The cultural fabric of Voronezh contains centuries of interaction between the culture of the military, merchant and intellectual coefficients. The State Opera and Ballet Theatre, located in a neo-Baroque masterpiece, performs the classical repertoire and commissioned performances by modern Russian composers. Experimental and represented avant-garde works are promoted in smaller theatres such as the Chamber Theatre and the Drama Theatre, and participants often participate in student theatrical groups in local universities. There is the bustling restaurant industry, cafe courts, and jazz bars spill out upon cobblestone streets, providing live music and poetry readings that make downtown animated at night.

The city is also marked with a layered heritage, which is traced by museums. The State Art Museum is a display of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian paintings, and the Regional Museum features archaeological discoveries of hillforts to medieval ceramics. Anchored nearby is the Ship-Museum Goto Predestinatsia, where visitors are invited into a replica of the flagship of Peter the Great to view collections of naval artefacts and model ships. The folk homes craft of wood carvings, pottery, and iconography are recognised in annual exhibits by many of whose artisans have honed the arts through their family generations.

Voronezh is an artistic centre, and this is reinforced through open festivals. The Platonov Arts Festival opened in 2011 and celebrates local author Andrei Platonov with theatre, music, dance and visual arts, both Russian and international. Cultural events such as street-art fairs turn defunct factories into al fresco art galleries, and representing the culinary world, there are Black Earth focus fairs, sunflower-oil tasting, honey festivals, and sugar-beet cuisine competitions. Cossack dance groups still exist in traditional companies that perform in summer fairs on the outskirts of the city, which contain steppe rhythms in conjunction with modern movements.

As artistic spaces, industrial lofts have been appropriated by contemporary creative entrepreneurs to create co-working spaces, art galleries, and make-shift theatres to combine start-up culture with artistic experimentation. The independent film festivals exhibit both domestic and international shows in retrofitted warehouses, and literary salons expose budding writers to exchange words with established novelists. Such institutional support, coupled with a grassroots initiative, emphasises further influence on the promotion of Voronezh toward the development of social dialogue and innovation in the cultural front.

Language

Voronezh is an officially Russian-speaking city used in day-to-day life in administration, education and media. But even the local vernacular shows distinctive traits of the Southern branch of the Russian dialect. Such a local accent puts melodies on ordinary speech and elongates vowels so that the speakers of Voronezh could be distinguished among Muscovites and speakers of the Volga region. Other than the Russian language, the Ukrainian, Armenian, Tatar, and Romani languages are still spoken between families and among the community hubs.

Geography

The territory of Voronezh occupies about 601 square kilometres of the Central Russian Upland, which has an average height of 150 meters above sea level. It crosses the landscape of the forest-steppe mosaic of oak-hornbeam groves, giving way to wheels of growing wheat and sunflower, based on one of the richest chernozem soils in the world. Characteristic of the city are nature reserves in the outskirts, which conserve remains of forests and grasslands, as well as providing hiking routes and educational centres, where visitors are taught about the conservation of soil and biodiversity.

The city is delimited by the river Voronezh, which outlines the city's urban centre, which used to be filled with barges that carried grain and timber. To the locals and tourists alike, today, river cruises and renting of paddle-boats remain active, and embankment landscapes serve as a venue for summer concerts and weekend fairs. Recreational fishing, birdwatching and water-sports clubs are served by tributaries and artificial lakes built on the outskirts of the city, allowing the city life to be intersected with the aquatic heritage of the area.

Being a transport hub, Voronezh is the knot point of the M4 Don federal highway and the Southeastern Railway. The city is connected to Moscow, Rostov-on-Don and the Urals by high-speed and freight trains and served by highway networks enabling local grain export and automobile assembly. Bulk cargo goes upriver to the Volga and Azov basins by means of two river ports, demonstrating the continuous significance of the concerned locations of Voronezh as a connecting point between central Russia and the Black Sea.

The climate of Voronezh is a temperate continental; summers are warm and winters are cold and covered with snow. Mean monthly maximum temperatures in July are around 20 °C, frequently exceeding 30 °C, which promotes summer festivals and river activity. During winters, there is continuous snow cover throughout the period of December, February, and the lowest temperatures that are experienced in January are at -10 °C. Spring melts give life back to the parks in the city and flower up the ornamental gardens, and in autumn, crisp, fresh winds and colourful leaves on the streets and avenues with trees. Annual rains of about 550 mm encourage green in the city and farming in the surrounding environs, with good drainage systems being a prerequisite to control the spring flood waters.

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