Yaroslavskaya gora – is the present-day Strelka, a hill bounded by the rivers Volga and Kotorosl, and on the third side – by the Medveditsky ditch-ravine. It was here that the key events of the early history took place. In terns of mythology the Yaroslavl hill is the world hill, the sacred grave of the times of which no written records have been preserved, the main heathen temple and birthplace of Veles.
There used to be a settlement on this site called Medvezhy Ugol, a trading station rather than a fortress, a place for trade and crafts (the town has been famous for these ever since) on the great Volga route fromVarangians to Arabs which connected the Baltic Sea and the White Sea regions with the Hazar kingdom, Persia and Bagdad.
Since those times Yaroslavl region situated in the upper Volga has been involved in the orbit of world life and Yaroslavl has remained the cross-roads of age-old water-ways and
high-ways. The rivers Volga and Kotorosl have been the main streets of the Town for centuries.
But another thing is also important. Yaroslavl was a hidden gate to the secret mystical garden of the Tsarsky grad, Rostov-Veliky. Yaroslavl – the threshold of the eternity, the decorated gate to the heavenly town of Kitezh. It is from here that a voyage-pilgrimage begins along the secret invisible Volga flowing into the mystic Svetloyar, and no wonder that it was here that the Kitezh legend was recorded, and later, when Yaroslavl was founded at the foot of the sacred hill, in the Medveditsky ditch, the famous “Lay of Igor’s Host” was found.
Yaroslavl is the hometown of people’s volunteer corps which was being raised here by Kozma Minin and Dmitry Pozharsky in 1612, and for several months the town was, in fact, the capital of the collapsing country, and the starting point of its future salvation.
The landscape polycentrism of Yaroslavl reveals itself in the appearance of new centres, towns within a town, the most striking of which is the Melenki-Zelentsovsky Brook district. There in the early XVIII century a space began to be structurised around the Big Yaroslavl textile mill that in the Soviet times came to be called Krasny Perekop. Its focus is the grand Peter and Paul Cathedral in the park with fountains and sculptures, with a detached house of the manager over a system of communicating ponds. It is a successful attempt to realize a regular utopia, a logical chimera which is, however, no more that a picturesque ruin at present.
It should be noted that Yaroslavl is the “home of Russian theatre”.
Fyodor Volkov and Ivan Dmitriyevsky began their rise here. In Yaroslavl the XVIII century was the age of imaginary and fantastic art, the age of theatre.The dominance of dramatic art in the cultural life of Yaroslavl is a compensation for the social failure of the XVII century Renaissance. This is a dramatically complex baroque reaction to the crisis of the Renaissance with its bravuro-optimistic life goals and plans. The facade of the theatre has become the visiting card of Yaroslavl and the magnificent hall with overhead frescoes depicting an ancient ritual procession – its elisium of arts.

Yevgeny Yermolin