Yekaterinburg is famous for two things. Which one is more significant, I will leave you to judge! We arrived there on the train after lunch today having crossed the Ural Mountains. Yekaterinburg is the fourth largest city in Russia with an estimated population of just over 1.5 million. In the Communist era it was known as Sverdlovsk and reverted to the name Yekaterinburg with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
We started our tour with the first of the well-known things – Boris Yeltsin. Yekaterinburg is his home city and in his honour, they have spent billions of roubles on a Boris Yeltsin Memorial Centre.
Yekaterinburg is named after Catherine I – the wife of Peter the Great and so the connection with the Romanov family is immediately close. However, it is what happened to the Romanovs which is the second major thing about Yekaterinburg. Following the October Revolution, the family of Tsar Nicholas II were sent to Yekaterinburg on internal exile. On the 17th July 1918 they were taken to the cellar of the house they were in and shot. The Red Army were concerned about the progress of the White Army who were advancing on the city fast, so that marked the end of the Romanov dynasty. The house was demolished, but when the bodies were discovered, a cathedral was built on the spot where the house stood. The cathedral is called the Church of the Spilled Blood and replaced Ipatiev House – the house which the Romanov family were exiled to. Construction of the church began in 2000 and was completed in 2003 – a remarkable achievement considering the scale of the building.
