3 Days in Yekaterinburg

This is where Yekaterinburg started. The dam on the Iset was begun in 1721 on Vasily Tatishchev's decision, stopped for lack of approval, and finished on 11 September 1723 after Wilhelm de Gennin arrived in the Urals. Built of larch logs and granite, it powered the ironworks the city grew around. The pond behind it is the City Pond, and locals call the dam and the square beside it Plotinka ("the little dam"). Prospekt Lenina, the main street, runs along the axis of the dam.

The square is a 1973 creation for the city's 250th anniversary, laid out on the old ironworks site. A few surviving factory buildings hold the Museum of Architecture and Industrial Technology of the Urals, with old machinery outside. Walk the dam both ways and look up the pond. Don't expect an old town: this is a factory town that kept its first factory yard.

The Red Line is a walking route of the historic center painted in red on the pavement. Volunteers opened it on 18 June 2011, after nearly 11,000 people voted online on what to include. It began at about 6.5 km and now runs about 9 km, with painted numbers marking the sights.

It's the easiest way to see the center without planning. Pick it up near the dam, follow it past Sevastyanov House and along Prospekt Lenina, and drop off when your feet say stop. Don't try all 9 km in winter.

Five minutes along Prospekt Lenina, on the pond, stands one of the city's best-known buildings. It dates from 1817 and was reworked in 1866 by Alexander Paduchev for the owner Nikolai Sevastyanov, in an eclectic mix of Gothic and baroque details. In 1874 it was sold to the Ministry of Justice and became the District Court; after 1917 it housed the Urals Commissariat of Labor and then the trade unions. A full restoration in 2008-2009 came before the SCO and BRIC summits.

Today it receives official guests, so you see it from outside. The facade is on Bank of Russia coins and on the 5,000-ruble banknote issued in 2023.

You can't write about the Urals without pelmeni. The word comes from the Komi and Udmurt pelnyan, "bread ear", and Russians in the Kama region, the Urals and Siberia took the dish from the Finno-Ugric peoples, probably by the 16th century. Here it is the default winter lunch: boiled dumplings of minced meat in thin dough, with sour cream, butter, mustard or vinegar.

Weiner Street is a pedestrian street of cafes in the center, a fine spot for a long lunch. Look for a pelmennaya (dumpling cafe) or a stolovaya (canteen) rather than a restaurant with a leather menu. Order the pelmeni with sour cream and a pot of tea; you won't need more.

On the Iset embankment, a short walk from the dam, sits the city's silliest and most photographed monument: a Cyrillic computer keyboard at a scale of 30 to 1. Anatoly Vyatkin made it from 104 concrete keys, installed on 5 October 2005, over 16 by 4 meters. Yandex's 2019 survey found it was the second most searched monument in Russia, behind only the Bronze Horseman.

Four keys were stolen and replaced in 2011, demolition was threatened in 2019, and it was restored in 2025. It takes ten minutes.

Yekaterinburg's real architectural surprise lies a short walk northeast: a block of constructivist buildings. Chekists' Town (Gorodok chekistov) was built between 1929 and 1936 for the OGPU, later the NKVD, between Lenina, Lunacharskogo, Pervomayskaya and Kuznechnaya streets. Ivan Antonov led the design team. It has 14 buildings, a federal heritage site, planned as housing with clubs and shops inside.

The icon is Building 1, an 11-storey half-circle that locals call "the horseshoe". It began as a dormitory for single staff, became the Iset hotel in 1962 and worked until 2002, then again from 2006 to 2013. It has been closed since, and as of 2022 the region was still looking for an investor to restore it, with restaurants on the ground floor. Don't confuse it with the Iset Tower, a 212.8 m glass skyscraper in Yekaterinburg-City named after the river. Walk the courtyards and look at the long balconies.

Finish on the 52nd floor of the Vysotsky tower, an open deck about 186 m up. The building has 54 floors, rises 188.3 m, and opened on 25 November 2011, with the deck following on 4 May 2012. It is named after the poet and singer Vladimir Vysotsky, and vysokiy also means "tall". Behind it is a bronze statue of Vysotsky and his wife, the French actress Marina Vlady.

The view is the reason: the City Pond, the dam, the blocks of the center and the glass towers of Yekaterinburg-City. Go for the hour before dark and stay until the lights come on. The deck is open air, and the wind at 186 m in January isn't friendly. If visibility is bad, come back another night.

Near Pervouralsk, about 40 km west of the center, stands the obelisk where you can put one foot in Europe and one in Asia. It is a favorite spot for wedding photos. The honest bit: the border isn't real, it's a convention. Philip Johan von Strahlenberg argued for an Urals border in 1730, and Tatishchev, a founder of Yekaterinburg, later claimed he gave him the idea. Humboldt and Gustav Rose placed the crossing near Berezovaya Mountain in 1829, and the first Urals obelisk went up there in 1837 for the visit of the heir to the throne.

So which one is the real one? None. Neither the old marker nor the big monument stands on a line anyone can measure, so treat it as a place to stand, take a picture and move on. A small old stone marker with a brick line stands by the road, and the big monument is a short walk up through the trees.

The Church on the Blood stands on the site of the Ipatiev House, where Nicholas II, his wife, their four daughters and their son were held for 78 days and then shot on the night of 16-17 July 1918, with the physician and three servants. The Ural Soviet gave the order as the Czechoslovak Legion approached the city. In 1977 the house, a national monument since 1974, was demolished on the Soviet government's orders under the direction of Boris Yeltsin. In 1990 the plot went to the Church, the family was canonized as passion bearers on 15 August 2000, and the church was built from 2000 to 2003.

The five-domed Russian-Byzantine complex has two levels. The upper church is bright, with a white marble iconostasis; the lower one is dim and holds a crypt that recreates the room of the shooting. A separate patriarchal building has the Museum of the Holy Royal Family. It's an active church and a place of pilgrimage, so dress modestly and keep your voice down. The story here is told from the viewpoint of the faithful.

Ten minutes' walk from the church, in Yekaterinburg-City, is the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center, opened on 25 November 2015. Boris Bernaskoni designed it, and the museum inside tells the recent political history of Russia and the life of its first president. In 2017 the Council of Europe recognized it as the best museum in Europe, a first for Russia, and over 250,000 people came in its first year.

Expect a long, interactive walk through the 1990s. Those years are still argued about in Russia, and the museum takes a position, so read the labels as one view.

If the Urals have a signature, it's stone. The museum, part of the Ural Mining University, opened in August 1937 when the International Geological Congress was in Moscow with a Urals excursion on its program. It holds more than 40,000 exhibits, built on the private collection of Alexander Kalugin, who started collecting in 1874. Visitors have included Mao, Nehru, Ho Chi Minh and Yeltsin.

The highlights are gold and platinum, amethysts, emeralds, topaz, rhodonite and malachite, and minerals first found in the Urals and named after their places, like ilmenite and nevyanskite. The showpiece is a quartz crystal 170 cm tall and 784 kg. It's the best place to see Ural gems before you buy any.

End the day around the Square of 1905, the main square of the center. Dinner here means the classic Russian table: shchi (cabbage soup), borscht, a plate of olivier and a hot main, with kvass to drink.

Ask for the soup of the day. Visa and Mastercard issued abroad don't work (see the tips), so carry cash.

The White Tower in the Uralmash district is a concrete water tower and one of the best constructivist buildings in the city. Moisei Reisher designed it for the Uralmash plant, built 1929 to 1931, as one of Sverdlovsk's first reinforced-concrete structures. It went out of use in the 1960s and decayed for decades, and it became the unofficial symbol of the district.

Since 2012 the architecture group Podelniki has looked after it as a cultural venue, and in July 2020 it won a $180,000 restoration grant from the Getty Foundation. You mostly see it from outside; check whether an event is on if you want to get in. It's worth ten minutes for the shape and the walk into the Uralmash blocks around it.

Ganina Yama is an abandoned iron-ore mine in the Four Brothers forest, about 15 km north of the city. After the shooting, the bodies were brought here in July 1918 and thrown into the pit. A week later the White Army took the area and found charred bones and signs of fire. The Bolsheviks, though, had returned the next night and moved the bodies to a second site, a field called Porosyonkov Log a few kilometers away.

Today a monastery of the Holy Royal Passion Bearers stands here, built from 2000, in a quiet forest. The remains are still disputed. Those found at Porosyonkov Log were identified by DNA in the 1990s and buried in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg in 1998; the Church did not accept that, and a widespread legend holds that the family was destroyed at Ganina Yama. The grounds are reported open daily and free; the monastery museum charges.

Nevyansk is a small town that was an ironworking center in the 18th century. Eat before the tower, in whatever is open near it. A town cafe or canteen will serve pirozhki (baked buns with meat, cabbage or potato) and hot soup, which is the right lunch. In winter the cafes close early, so eat first and don't count on a second chance.

The Nevyansk Tower is a 57.5 m tower built from 1721 to 1725 on the order of the ironmaster Akinfiy Demidov, and its top leans about 1.85 m off vertical. It served as a clock tower, a watchtower, an archive and an office, and it is on the town's coat of arms. Its iron and cast-iron beams work like modern reinforced concrete, and the spire's weather vane is grounded: a lightning rod about 25 years before Benjamin Franklin designed his.

Inside, the stairs are narrow and have no handrails. The clock came from England, made by Richard Phelps in 1730 and bought in 1732 for 5,000 gold rubles, more than the tower cost. Its chimes have played Glinka's Slavsya since 1985. The top has a small viewing platform, and in the acoustic room on an upper floor a whisper in one corner carries to the opposite one. The tower closed for restoration in 2025; a travel site reports it open again daily, around 10:00-18:00, but that isn't confirmed, so check before you make the trip.