Nizhny Novgorod // The city on the Volga River // Sights and history
Hello my friends! Welcome back to my channel and welcome to my new video! Today's video is going to be not from the Far East, not from Moscow but from the city of Nizhny Novgorod. Right now we're passing along the main street of this city it's called Bolshaya Pokrovskaya ulitsa, and this 800 number is here for a reason because this year Nizhny Novgorod celebrates its 800 years anniversary, this city is very old. I don't know much about the city, but I'm gonna explore it with you, so welcome to the new video, and look at this beautiful street! Nizhny Novgorod is a city located 400 kilometers east of Moscow, at the confluence of two great rivers, the Volga and the Oka. It is one of the so-called millionaire cities, it is the sixth
largest city in Russia. In this video you will visit the important sites of Nizhny Novgorod, see what it's like to commute to work flying over the longest river in Europe, and you will accompany me to my VIP place at the celebration of the city anniversary. Tonight I'm gonna meet my friend with her two other friends, and we are going to go to the concert.
In honor of the city's anniversary, every week there are concerts of famous Russian singers and musicians, So today there will be a concert of Valery Meladze, a very popular man. So it's like a big event and everybody is going there, and actually, guys, authorities learned that I myself came to Nizhny Novgorod, so they gave me and my friends VIP tickets, so we will be able to see the concert from a very good location, let's go! *sounds of the concert* Not a surprise. In Russia you often find yourself behind the bars, so... After enjoying the concert, we went for a walk through the historical part of the city. This is Rozhdestvenskaya street, there are also garlands representing the symbols of Nizhny Novgorod. The atom symbolizes the nuclear industry, the bone shaker bike is a reference to the Nizhny
Novgorod Museum of ancient techniques and tools, this wi-fi kind of symbol probably means the waves of the Volga River but I'm not sure, but I couldn't understand what this moustache means, finally I realized that it was the moustache of Maxim Gorky, the great Soviet writer who hails from Nizhny Novgorod. In 1932 the city was even officially renamed in honor of the writer, Gorky, but in 1990 it was given back its old name - Nizhny Novgorod. By the way, don't confuse it with Veliky Novgorod, these are two different cities. Then we visited another landmark of the city, Chkalovskaya staircase. It is named after
the soviet test pilot Valery Chkalov, he was the commander of the crew of the plane that made the first non-stop flight across the North Pole from Moscow to America in 1937. From here you can see the Volga River and it is a good point to watch the sunset. It is believed that the most beautiful sunsets in Russia can be observed in Nizhny Novgorod.
The morning of the next day, I'm fresh and energetic, and yes now I'm in a gostinitsa, a hotel if I can call it so, and now I want to return to the yesterday's party with my friends. They all are originally from Nizhny Novgorod, so they gave me some insights about the city, and it was so unusual to hear them speaking about some casual things, for example, they discussed dentists and one girl was telling about her good dentist, and then another one asked, "Is he located in the upper or in the lower part of the city?" Later they explained me that Nizhny Novgorod is divided into two different parts, divided by the Volga River, the upper part and the lower part, and that is quite hard to get from one part to another, there are a lot of traffic jams, and also we discussed traveling, and it was so insane for them when i mentioned that my flight from Khabarovsk to Moscow took me eight hours, because here in the European part of Russia, everything is close to each other. This girl was surprised when I said that in the far east, the train from Khabarovsk to Spassk is slower than the same route by the car, she was surprised because here in the European part of Russia, they can take a faster train from Moscow to Nizhny Novgorod, and on the contrary, traveling by car is slower because there might be some traffic jams, and that's why I love conversations with locals because I would never learn this information from some documentary or tour guide book or whatever. And since we've learned some theory, let's try it on practice, and now we'll go
and see some remarkable places of Nizhny Novgorod. Now we are on the Verkhne-Volzhskaya Embankment, as you can see, the city today meets us with the wonderful weather, without any wind, and now I'm going to some very important landmark, it's called a cable... railway... rights? A cableway that goes through, not through but above the Volga River. So now we are here, and we have to go here, let's go. I finally came to this station, but there's some construction there, oh what a beautiful day... Um, I guess, I'm not supposed to cross here, ah probably it means that I have to go all the way around, okay.
The way to this cableway took more time than I expected, maybe i should just take the Ferris wheel instead and show you the city from it, oh probably this is the station? No. Oh look guys, I found a mosque, this is actually the first mosque in my life that I see. It also has cupolas but they're kind of different.
Oh my god, why I signed up for this. Look at this bench. Here it is, Nizhny Novgorod ropeway. Now I'm gonna buy the tickets. It doesn't want to let me go. So guys, you see I'm a VIP person, even though my ticket didn't work, the worker just let me in...
It was a little scary to fly over the Volga in such a small cabin. The length of the Nizhny Novgorod cable car is 3361 meters. It is the longest cable car in Europe used for public transport. Volga is the longest river in Europe. Thanks to this river, Nizhny Novgorod has long been a trade center connecting the north and south of Russia. During the Russian Empire, dynasties of entrepreneurs flourished in the city.
The entrepreneurs built water supply system, universities, housing called widows, and of course, luxurious estates for themselves. To some extent, Nizhny Novgorod was the birthplace of the Russian capitalism. This is how geographic location can influence the development of a city. We finally arrived at the opposite shore of the Volga River,, and it seemed to me that people in the car didn't share my enthusiasm because for them it's just their usual daily routine, and I was sitting here just, oh my god, filming everything, and yes, now we came to the city of Bor, It's actually a small town, and it is the satellite city of Nizhny Novgorod, and why we came here? Actually for no reason, because the only purpose for me to come here was just to try out this ropeway Bor meets us with this um soviet panel building, another panel building, oh there's some pipe factory in the city, but here you can see some information about this town, about its churches and cathedrals, about sport activities, and this is some information about this cableway, 12 minutes one way, it seems to me that it was faster.
And now I'm going back. Just imagine guys, every day you are commuting over the Volga River with eight people in a cramped car. And how people were making casual phone calls, yeah it's unusual for me.
Now I'm going to undertake 30 minutes walk towards the city center ,and there I will meet my friend. Let's explore the city center. I came to Nizhny Novgorod because I wanted to experience something ancient, some old Russian cities besides Moscow, but when i came here I met this confusion, what should we I tell you about? Because I'm an alien in this city, that's why I actually had to prepare something, I watched a lot of vlogs and documentaries about Nizhny Novgorod, I just felt very stressed about how I'm gonna build my vlog. But eventually I realized that for me it doesn't work this way, I am not able to show you all the landmarks of the city anyways, so I think it's better for me to see three sights but fully experience them, than to be in a rush and see all the ten different sights of the city. After that I met my friend, she told me a lot of interesting things about the city.
and we wanted to visit the Temp coffee shop because it is originally from Nizhny Novgorod, so we came to the coffee shop, but... And one of the local cafes I wanted to show you is this Temp coffee, but actually right now it's closing because the guy told us that they're going to make some renovation for a week, so yeah, guys, perfect timing, I love it. Nevertheless, we still went to another cool cafe in the city center and then we continued to explore the sights of the city And one of them is the Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin.
The Kremlin in ancient Russia was the name of the fortress that surrounds the city center. The Kremlin in. Nizhny Novgorod, still wooden, was erected in 1221 by the Grand Prince of Vladimir, Yuri Vsevolodovich, and this year is considered the date of the founding of the city.
Under the rule of Ivan the Third Nizhny Novgorod was a guard city. It served as a place for gathering troops for Moscow's actions against the Khanate of Kazan. With the fall of Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod Kremlin lost its military significance, and Russia continued to grow eastward. Today the Kremlin is a very popular place, and unlike the Moscow Kremlin, here you can even walk along the territory. And actually, the territory is very big and you can walk here as long as you want, there is a temple, old helicopters and planes, it's like a park just in the middle of a fort, and here there's a tank, the tank of the Second World War times, and this is the fort, this is the only fortress where you can walk inside.
So far we have been exploring the upper part of the city, and now let's see what's interesting in the lower part. One of the ways to go there is by the metro. Like with the Kremlin, I was surprised to learn that Nizhny Novgorod has its own metro system. Nizhny Novgorod has their subway as well, and I now want to compare it with the Moscow one, let's go. The first launch site of the Gorky metro was opened in 1985. This is how the metro map looks
today, but in the beginning it operated only in the lower part of the city. In the 90s, the USSR collapsed, and for about 30 years the city's budget had no money to continue the construction of new stations. The metro was unclaimed and suffered losses. Only in 2009 the metro bridge across the Oka was built. And finally in 2012 the first metro station in the upper part was opened. Both sides of the city were connected to each other, and this increased passenger traffic by 75 percent.
This station that we just arrived at is called Stelka, an arrow, and it was finished in the year of the world football championship in 2018. One more thing that reminds us that three years ago there was the championship is this dog, it's called Zabivaka, this is the Russian symbol, and the blue building behind it is the famous Nizhny Novgorod arena, it was built specially for the games. The FIFA World Cup helped to improve the city in many ways, for example, it made the authorities to finally improve the Nizhne-Volzhskaya Embankment which was previously hidden by a blue fence. This legendary fence stood there for 13 years, but before the World Cup in 2018 it was finally demolished. The Nizhny Novgorod residents dismantled pieces of the fence for souvenirs.
And now we're in the part of the city called the Arrow, it is a natural landmark located at the confluence of the Oka and Volga rivers, it is also home to sites such as the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral and the Nizhny Novgorod Fair. The largest fair of the Russian Empire took place here. From here you can see the view of the upper part of the city, and this pink spot is the Kremlin, by the way. I wonder what if you start rolling from here to the bottom. This would be fun. if this is a pawn, where is the chessboard then? Why all the road signs here are covered? Why do you hide the truth? Wherever you look, everything in this city reminds of its great history. It was unusual for me to prepare this video, as well as the previous one about old villages, because here I often saw references to the times of princes, which I never came across when making videos about the far east, because our cities are younger and they developed in a different way.
There are many attractions that you will find interesting if you come here, but after spending several days in Nizhny Novgorod, my impression was rather negative. Living in the far east, I thought that the closer the city to Moscow, the more developed it is, but it turned out that Nizhny Novgorod is like another Khabarovsk for me, with the same problems or maybe even worse. If i wanted to move from the far east, I would go directly to Moscow or abroad. Anyway, it is time to continue my journey and now I'm going to the lower part of the city again, to the railway station. Now I'm Nizhny Novgorod railway station, waiting for my train to my next destination, Vladimir, and this is the time to finish this video. Thank you guys for watching, if you like this video, tap like, subscribe to my channel, write your comments.
Do you like Nizhny Novgorod? Would you like to visit this city? I will see you very soon!
2021-12-01 23:41
