Blagoveshchensk. A city to which you want to return.
The Far East is a special people. These are the descendants of those who came, sailed, arrived - voluntarily or in shackles - from other, more blessed lands. Arriving by their own or someone else's will, as if for a while, many settlers remained here forever, mastered, improved - as they say, raised the Far Eastern region. So it was in the recent Soviet times of the great construction projects - the BAM, the Zeya hydroelectric power station. So it was at the beginning of the century, when the longest Trans-Siberian railway in the world was laid through the Far Eastern taiga. So it was a century and a half ago, when the glorious city of Blagoveshchensk was founded.
The purposefulness, dedication, determination of those who came to explore the wild shores of the Amur in the middle of the 19th century never cease to amaze. Going far away to uninhabited, unexplored, almost deserted places is far from being possible for everyone. They were patriots of their never affectionate Motherland. They increased its territory, wealth and power. They did not consider themselves heroes, but we, the descendants, understand that these people did not live their lives in vain, having managed to leave behind so much: they discovered previously unknown seas, mountains, rivers, straits and islands, giving them their names and the names of their comrades, paved roads in the untrodden wilds, founded settlements and cities in the vast expanses of new Russian lands.
Blagoveshchensk could forever remain a frontier post or, at best, a stanitsa. It could disappear without a trace, as hundreds of settlements along the banks of the Amur disappeared, destroyed by floods, abandoned by the inhabitants because of the hopelessness. But fate decreed otherwise.
What courage, what foresight, what a rich imagination one had to have in order to guess the place for the future city in the middle of the vastness of an unknown land! Surely then - almost a century and a half ago - everything happened everyday, and no one thought about the greatness of the historical moment. But the fact that from now on, from here, from the banks of the Amur, Russian land begins, that now the Russian border lay here, which must be protected, probably everyone thought.
In 1858, on May 9, His Grace Innokenty, in the presence of Governor-General N. N. Muravyov-Amursky, founded a church in the Ust-Zeya village in the name of the Annunciation of the Most Holy Theotokos, and the village itself was renamed the city of Blagoveshchensk - the center of the newly formed Amur Region.
The new city, thanks to its advantageous position with two navigable rivers and close proximity to the populated part of Manchuria, began to develop rapidly and at the very beginning became one of the best settlements in the Amur Territory.
The leaders of the Russian state very rarely came to our remote lands, but still...
Returning from an unfinished round-the-world trip, the future last Russian emperor, and then Tsarevich Nikolai Romanov, stayed in Blagoveshchensk. In 1994, the first President of the Russian Federation, B. N. Yeltsin, visited here, and in 2000, the newly elected President, V. V. Putin. Today, September 2.2014, Vladimir Putin from Yakutia also came to our Amur Region on a working visit to the Vostochny cosmodrome, the construction of which is nearing completion.
Blagoveshchensk is famous for its hospitality. And not only because open, friendly, ready to cooperate people live here. The city itself is remembered and sinks into the soul. This feature is noted by everyone who has been here at least once, wandered through the quiet green streets and squares, admired the beautiful buildings - historical and modern, - walked along the magnificent Amur embankment.
It is impossible to say when our city is more beautiful, at what time of the day and night, at what time of the year.
Spring begins with ice drift: Annunciation people, even those who live far from the river, ask each other: has the ice gone? Old-timers know that on the eve of the ice drift, a strong wind will surely blow from somewhere in the east. Piercingly cold, this wind in some unknown way conceals the spring warmth, which is hardly guessed, but pleases the soul and...... breaks the ice in the end. He, at first white, bristling with hummocks, moves slowly and heaps, as if reluctantly. And then the ice floes become more and more transparent, thinner and smaller, and there are more and more clearings between them, the flow of open water is freer.
Yes, in recent decades, Blagoveshchensk has dressed up in asphalt and tiles, embellished with high-rise buildings, and acquired a huge number of modern cars. But the "pieces of wood" - houses that have been standing in quiet corners for a hundred years - give the city a unique charm.
A beautiful, some kind of pacifying and at the same time pleasing place was chosen by the founders for our glorious city. He himself is like a monument to everyone who created and built this outpost of the Russian land.
Blagoveshchensk. A city to which you want to return.
