Don Ring: from Lebedyan to Ranenburg

Description

A two-day ring along the upper Don — across the north of Lipetsk Oblast, where provincial cities keep stories of state scale: the first hippodrome in Russia, Peter's Oranienburg — the "orange fortress" and painting in a rural church. About one hundred and eighty kilometers of roads; it is more convenient to put an overnight stay in the middle of the ring, on the Don or in Dankov. Start is Lebedyan on both banks of the Don, a city with a voivode since 1613 and a horse biography: in 1826 the first hippodrome in Russia opened here and the Lebedyan racing society started work. Above the river stand the Trinity Monastery of 1621 — a real monastery-fortress with three seventeenth-century churches — and the Novo-Kazansky Cathedral with its sixty-meter bell tower. This is the birthplace of Evgeny Zamyatin, with a house-museum on Sitnikov Street; in 1926 Kustodiev came here to work. And a local legend — Tyapkina Mountain with robber Tyapka and "the shortest metro in the world": a two-hundred-meter tunnel that a pensioner dug by hand from 1989 to 2011. Further the road goes southwest, to the village of Krasnoye, "beyond the Red Forest" — a typical point of quiet Chernozem, known since 1678. Its vertical is the restored Vladimir Church of 1840, built at the expense of landowner Naumov; around are fields to the horizon and a feeling of deep countryside without tourist attributes. From here the route turns north, to Dankov — a fortress of 1568 on the Don at the confluence of the Vyazovnya, named after the ancient Donkov of the Ryazan principality. Here the main surprise is the art gallery "Little Tretyakovka", unfolded in the former church of Demetrius of Thessaloniki of 1790, and the only planetarium in Lipetsk Oblast; with Kulikovo Field nearby, and the town remembers the pontoon battalion that went from the Don to Berlin. The finale is Chaplygin, former Ranenburg: a place that in 1695 Peter the First chose for a travel palace on the way from Moscow to Voronezh, and in 1702 laid out a fortress on the Dutch model and presented the lands to Menshikov. Dutch mills and orange groves did not grow, but Menshikov's palace stands — a local history museum works in it, this is the only building of the city directly connected with the fortress. The dominant is the Trinity Cathedral: it was built from 1806 to 1845, and according to one of the versions the author of the project is Voronikhin, the architect of the Kazan Cathedral. Inspection of the center is convenient to build around Cathedral Square and Upper Park — and the ring closes there, where the road of Peter once began.