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Tula is the capital of Tula Oblast, a city of about half a million people on the Upa River in the Central Russian Upland, 193 kilometres south of Moscow. It is famous across Russia for arms, samovars and printed gingerbread, so famous that Russians say there is no point taking your own samovar to Tula.
First mentioned in 1146, Tula was a border fortress, and its brick Kremlin went up in 1514-1521 to guard the road to Moscow. In 1712 Peter the Great founded the arms works here, and the Demidov family made the city a great centre of ironworking. In 1941 Tula held out against Guderian's tanks, and it was named a Hero City in 1976.
Visitors walk the Kremlin walls and the new Kazanskaya Embankment, tour the helmet-shaped Museum of Weapons and the samovar and gingerbread museums, and climb to the Demidov Church and All Saints Cathedral. Leo Tolstoy's estate of Yasnaya Polyana lies about 12 kilometres south-west of the city.
The Tula Kremlin is the brick fortress at the heart of Tula, built in 1514-1521 on the left bank of the Upa River to guard the road to Moscow. Its rectangular walls, about 1,066 metres round and crowned with swallowtail battlements, join nine towers and held off the Crimean khan's army in 1552.
The Assumption Cathedral of the Tula Kremlin is the church with gilded domes inside the fortress walls of Tula, built in 1762-1766 as a summer church. Its bell tower was pulled down in the 1930s and rebuilt in 2012-2014, and it replaced an older stone cathedral of the 1680s that stood nearby.
Kazanskaya Embankment is the pedestrian riverside of Tula, running along the old channel of the Upa beside the Kremlin walls and named after a lost church of Our Lady of Kazan. Long a factory yard, it opened in 2018 on two levels, with paths at the water, cafés and red lanterns.
The Annunciation Church is the oldest Orthodox church in Tula and the only 17th-century architectural monument in the city, built in stone in 1692 in place of a wooden church. Closed in 1932, it was returned to believers in 1990, and restoration work has gone on there since the autumn of 2022.
The Tula State Museum of Weapons is one of the oldest and largest arms museums in Russia, built on pieces kept by the masters of the Tula Arms Plant since the 18th century. Since 2012 it has filled a new building in Tula shaped like an old Russian helmet, with tanks and rocket launchers outside.
The Tula Samovars Museum stands on Mendeleevskaya Street beside the Kremlin walls in Tula and opened in 1990 in a columned house rebuilt in 1910-1912. Its displays trace the samovar from the early sbiten urn to the many shapes and finishes of the 18th to 20th centuries made in the city.
The Tula Gingerbread Museum opened in 1996 in the former wings of the house of the Lyalin brothers, arms and samovar makers of Tula. It shows carved gingerbread boards once owned by well-known local confectioners, old packaging and photographs, and the smallest and largest gingerbreads in Russia.
Tula pryanik is the printed gingerbread of Tula, the best known of all Russian gingerbreads, first recorded in writing in 1685. Usually a flat glazed slab or figure stamped with a pattern from a carved wooden board, it is now most often filled with jam or condensed milk and sold all over the city.
Tula All Saints Cathedral is the main cathedral of the city, standing on high ground on Lev Tolstoy Street and seen from almost all of the city. Its first stone church was consecrated in 1776 in the All Saints cemetery, laid out after the plague of 1771, and its bell tower rises 82 metres.
The Nicholas-Zaretsky Church, known as the Demidov Church, stands in the old arms-makers' quarter across the Upa in Tula and was built in 1730-1734 by Akinfiy Demidov, son of Nikita Demidov. A crypt chapel of 1734 holds the tombs of the Demidov family, and its tall tiered bell tower is a landmark.
Belousov Central Park is the largest park in Tula, planted in 1893 on a former rubbish dump at the urging of the city doctor Pyotr Belousov, who helped plant the first trees himself. Today it covers 143 hectares, with 97 hectares of woodland and a cascade of three ponds.
The Tula Exotarium is the regional reptile zoo of Tula, founded in 1987 and also a base laboratory of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It keeps one of the largest collections of snakes in the world, with 497 species and subspecies, and draws about 80,000 visitors a year.
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