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Oryol is the capital of Oryol Oblast in central Russia, on the Oka River where it meets the Orlik, and it is famous as the birthplace of Ivan Turgenev and as a city of writers, officially named the Literary Capital of Russia in 2021. It lies 368 kilometres south-southwest of Moscow.
Ivan the Terrible ordered a fortress built here in 1566 to guard the southern border. It was sacked in the Time of Troubles and rebuilt in 1636, and in the 18th century the town grew rich on the grain trade along the Oka, becoming the seat of a province in 1778. Occupied from October 1941, Oryol was freed on 5 August 1943, when Moscow fired its first salute of the war, so it is called the City of the First Salute.
Today Oryol has a group of literary museums devoted to Turgenev, Leskov, Bunin, Andreyev and other writers of the region. Visitors stroll the Noble Nest park, see the Epiphany Cathedral near the meeting of the rivers, visit the diorama of the battle of 1943 and drive out to Turgenev's estate at Spasskoye-Lutovinovo.
The Turgenev Museum in Oryol honours Ivan Turgenev, who was born in the city in 1818. It opened on 24 November 1918 for the centenary of his birth, built around furniture and books from his estate at Spasskoye-Lutovinovo, and it now heads a group of museums of writers from Oryol.
The Leskov House Museum in Oryol is the only memorial museum of the writer Nikolai Leskov, who spent part of his childhood in the city. It stands on the site of his father's house above the Orlik, which burned in 1850, in a noble mansion of the 1870s, and it opened on 2 July 1974.
The Bunin Museum in Oryol is devoted to Ivan Bunin, the Nobel Prize winning writer who once worked for a newspaper in the city. It opened on 10 December 1991 in an old noble mansion in Georgievsky Lane and shows furniture and things from his Paris flat, where he lived from 1920 to 1953.
The Museum of Oryol Writers in Oryol tells of the classic poets and writers born in the region. It grew from a room devoted to Afanasy Fet in 1918, became a museum on 2 January 1957, and fills the Galakhov mansion of the mid-19th century, one of the few old noble houses left in the city.
The Epiphany Cathedral in Oryol is the oldest stone building of the city, on the Orlik River near where it flows into the Oka. Built of stone early in the 18th century in Naryshkin Baroque style, it is the last survivor of the old fortress quarter, and its bell tower was once the tallest in town.
The Vvedensky Monastery in Oryol is a convent founded in 1686 and moved after the fire of 1843 to a high bank of the Oka on the eastern edge of the city. Closed in 1923, it was returned to believers in 1993, and local legend links it with Liza Kalitina, the heroine of Turgenev's Home of the Gentry.
The Noble Nest is a leafy park in Oryol named after Turgenev's novel Home of the Gentry, published in 1859. Local historians see the house of the Kalitin family from the book in the wooden mansion of the early 19th century beside it, and a bust of Turgenev has stood in the park since 1903.
Dubrovinsky Embankment is a street running along the right bank of the Oka in Oryol, from the Bridge of Friendship of Peoples to beyond the October Bridge. In the 19th century its parts had other names, such as the Struga Embankment after a river landing, and it took its present name in 1968.
The Oryol Military History Museum opened on 5 August 1983, the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Oryol, in the red-brick house of the merchant Chikin built in 1890. Its large diorama shows the breaking of the German defences near Maloye Izmaylovo in July 1943, and a T-70 tank stands at the door.
The Oryol Regional Museum is one of the oldest museums of Oryol, opened on 7 December 1897 by the local archive commission in three rooms of the provincial offices. Its first gifts from local people included chain mail, a Greek amphora and a spear, and it tells the history of the region.
Spasskoye-Lutovinovo is the estate of Ivan Turgenev's mother in Mtsensk District of Oryol Oblast, now a memorial and nature reserve. Granted to the Lutovinovs by Ivan the Terrible, it was laid out from about 1800 to 1809 with a manor house, park and pond, and Turgenev grew up and later wrote here.
The Andreyev House Museum in Oryol is the wooden home where the writer Leonid Andreyev spent his childhood and youth until 1891. Built by his father in 1876 and still painted green as in his day, it opened as a museum on 21 August 1991, his 120th birthday, and keeps a piano from the family.
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