Nizhny Novgorod Embankments, street-art and shawarma

Nizhny Novgorod (colloquially known as Nizhny) has always been right on the verge of becoming a metropolitan city. Before the 20th, century Nizhny was an important merchant center: local fair trading was internationally favoured and one could get almost all sorts of goods there. Then came the industrial era. Nizhny Novgorod was a hometown for many revolutionaries, including Yakov Sverdlov and Maxim Gorky. During the Soviet-era Nizhny was a purely industrial and, therefore, closed city. It served as a production ground for ships, machinery, and automobiles. The city has been renamed into Gorky (after the writer Maxim Gorky) and was later nicknamed “the Russian Detroit” after its peer in the automobile industry.

After Perestroika, the city opened up and regained its status of a commercial center. Vestiges of the period still remain: the 90s best and most prominent shopping malls, apartment buildings, and banks. But the city has never become a real metropolis — neither back then, nor today.

Nearby the Main Fair Building, the key and most modern building of the 19th-century merchant city, you will discover blocks of wooden houses where the way of life has not changed for centuries. Yards of every single stalinka block (all similar Soviet apartment buildings), a symbol of the 20th-century Soviet Gorky, are filled with babushkas (Russian for “elderly women”) sitting along with cats, watching clothes drying on the ropes. An old manor house is hiding behind every single recently-built skyscraper. Nizhny is an ancient, perpetually dormant, patriarchal city — its very essence will confront modernity of any historical era.