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Penza is the capital of Penza Oblast, a city of about half a million people on the hilly banks of the Sura River, 625 kilometres south-east of Moscow. Its name comes from a Moksha word meaning the end of a swampy river, and today it is a major railway junction on the road from Moscow to Chelyabinsk.
The city began in 1663 as a wooden fortress built on the orders of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich to guard the south-eastern frontier against nomad raids. It was seized by Razin's rebels in 1670 and by Pugachev's in 1774, opened its first theatre season in 1793, and in Soviet times grew into an industrial centre where the Ural computers were made.
Visitors walk from the rebuilt Spassky Cathedral down the pedestrian Moskovskaya Street, meet the First Settler with his horse, and visit the Savitsky Art Gallery, the Museum of One Painting and Meyerhold House. The oak woods of Belinsky Park, the zoo and the botanical garden fill a summer afternoon.
Spassky Cathedral is the main cathedral of Penza, standing on Cathedral Square in the old fortress quarter, where the first wooden church was built with the fortress in 1663. The stone cathedral of 1800-1824 was destroyed in 1934, and a new one rose on the same spot in 2011-2021.
The First Settler Monument is the bronze statue of a soldier-farmer and his horse in the historic centre of Penza, facing remains of the 17th-century fortress rampart. Opened in 1980 and made by Valentin Kozenyuk, it shows a man with a spear in one hand and a plough under the other.
Moskovskaya Street is the oldest main street of Penza, running downhill from Cathedral Square through the historic trading centre. Merchants built the city's first two-storey houses here, and since the end of the 20th century its central stretch has been a pedestrian zone known as the Penza Arbat.
The Penza Spaso-Preobrazhensky Monastery is a men's monastery of the city, founded in 1689 near the fortress and moved in 1794 to what was then the edge of the city. Most of it was destroyed in Soviet times, but its Transfiguration Church survived, was returned in 1993 and again holds services.
The Savitsky Art Gallery is the largest and best-known museum of the Penza region, founded in 1892 on paintings given to Penza by governor Nikolai Seliverstov. It fills an Art Nouveau building of 1894-1897 in the city centre and bears the name of the painter Konstantin Savitsky.
The Museum of One Painting in Penza opened in 1983 and is described as the only museum of its kind in the world, with no permanent display. In a hall of 37 seats, each 45-minute session tells the story of a single canvas with slides and music, and then the curtain opens on the painting itself.
Meyerhold House is the wooden family home in Penza where Karl Meyerhold, father of the stage director Vsevolod Meyerhold, lived in 1881-1895. Opened in 1984 as the first memorial museum of a theatre director in Russia or abroad, it is now also a theatre that stages experimental plays.
The Penza Regional Museum of Local Lore was founded in 1905 by the Penza society of naturalists and first opened to the public in 1911. Housed in a brick building on Krasnaya Street, it holds over 103,000 items in seven displays, from nature and archaeology to ethnography and a mammoth skeleton.
Belinsky Park is the central park of Penza and one of the oldest parks in Russia, laid out from 1821 in an old forest beside the city. In 1911 it grew to 370 hectares with a neighbouring wooded park, and its oak woods hold the Olympic Alley of 1981 and the long Path of Health.
Penza Zoo was founded in 1981 in the old bishop's garden of Penza and covers 9.8 hectares, home to more than 3,200 animals of 201 species. It is the only zoo with success in raising chicks of the rare great bustard, and about 30 Amur tiger cubs have been born here.
The Penza Botanical Garden is the oldest scientific institution of Penza, set up by the naturalist Ivan Sprygin and opened on 1 June 1917. Its 4.2 hectares hold about 230 kinds of trees and shrubs from North America, Europe, Asia and Siberia, along with some 200 herbaceous plants.
The Penza Drama Theatre traces its first season to 1793 and is one of the oldest theatres in Russia, now named after Anatoly Lunacharsky. After its building of 1916 burned out on 2 January 2008, a new theatre opened in Penza in March 2010 with Gogol's comedy The Government Inspector.
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