390 EUSSIA IN EUROPE, 



amount annually to about 700,000 tons, valued at £5,000,000, and in the busy- 

 season the boats are so crowded together that they form a regular bridge across the 

 river. As many as 100,000 boatmen and traders congregate in the summer in this 

 place, whose chief industry is a large rope- walk. 



Yaroslai; capital of the province is probably the oldest Slav city founded on 

 the Volga, having been built in 1025 by the son of Vladimir the Great. Later on 

 it became the rival of Tver and Moscow for Russian ascendancy in the north. 

 Here a ferry connects the two sections of the Moscow- Vologda railway, which, 

 combined with its cotton and linen spinning-mills, gives it more commercial 

 importance than it could hope to derive from the junction of the little river 

 Ivotorost. In its neighbourhood, and also on the Volga, is Sope/ki, centre of 

 the sect of " Wanderers." Rostov, lying to the south-west on the Moscow highway, 

 and on a lake draining through the Kotorost to the Volga, is even an older place 

 than the present provincial capital. The chronicler Nestor mentions it as already 

 existing in the time of Kurik, in the ninth century, ard says that its first 

 inhabitants were Merians, a Slavonised race which, from the dawn of Russian 

 history, occupied a vast territory in the present province of Smolensk as far as the 

 Lower Oka. Their name does not occur in the chronicles after the year 907, but 

 the Finnish element has left its traces in the local geographical nomenclature, and 

 in the protracted opposition to Christianity, especially in Rostov, destined later on 

 to become one of the metropolitan sees of Russia. To this position, which it has 

 since forfeited, it is indebted for the honour of ranking as a holy city, and one of 

 its chief industries is the painting of sacred images on enamel, which are forwarded 

 to every part of the empire. 



Kostroma, capital of a province, was, like Rostov, an old city of the Merians, 

 and its name is that of a Finnish god. The games of pagan origin, which recalled 

 the worship of Kostroma or Yarilo, have been abolished in the town ; but in manj^ 

 rural districts straw figures are solemnly interred, rudely representing the hyper- 

 borean Adonis, the god " who appears and dies," in order again to rise and perish 

 perpetually. Kostroma, mentioned for the first time in the thirteenth century, 

 became later on a very famous place, and the lofty towers and domes of its kreml 

 still recall the time when it was a princely residence. It was here that in 1613 

 the States Greneral announced to Michael Romanov his election to the throne after 

 the expulsion of the Poles. He was then residing in the *' Cathedral Monas- 

 tery " of Ilypatus (see Fig. 204), near the town founded in 13-30 by a Tatar mirza, 

 who had been converted by a "miraculous apparition." The convent has since 

 then been twice rebuilt, in 1586 and 1650. 



At the junction of the Unja the Volga resumes its southerly course to more 

 populous regions, and soon approaches the city of Nijni-Novgorod. 



Basin of thk Oka. 



(Governments of Orol, Kaluga, Tula, Moscow, Kazan, Vladimir, -Tamiiov, and Nijni-Novgorod.) 



The basin of this important river forms the true centre of European Russia, not 

 only geographically, but also in respect of population and industrial activity. Here 



