Uglich does not announce itself. It sits on a wide bend of the Volga, smaller and shaggier than its famous Golden Ring neighbours, and the river cruise boats only stop here for a couple of hours before pushing on. Which is exactly why I liked it. We stayed the night, watched the boats leave, and had the whole place more or less to ourselves by dinnertime.
The church built over a death
The reason anyone knows Uglich’s name is a small boy. In 1591, the young Tsarevich Dmitry, the last of Ivan the Terrible’s line, was found dead in the kremlin courtyard with his throat cut. Was it an accident during an epileptic fit, as the official inquiry claimed, or murder ordered by Boris Godunov, as half of Russia believed? Nobody has ever truly settled it, and the uncertainty helped tip the country into the chaos of the Time of Troubles.
On the spot stands the Church of St. Dmitry on the Blood, painted a red so deliberate it feels less like architecture and more like an accusation. Inside, a faded fresco lays out the killing in comic-strip panels, and there is the old exile bell, the one that supposedly tolled the alarm and was then publicly flogged and banished to Siberia for the crime of ringing. A bell. Sent to Siberia. I stood there far too long, grinning at the absurd, magnificent seriousness of it.
A town that still works for a living
What makes Uglich more than a single grim anecdote is that it never tidied itself into a museum. The kremlin grounds are modest, the Transfiguration Cathedral plain and dignified, and beyond them the town just gets on with being a town. Wooden houses with carved window frames lean companionably together. A clock and watch factory once made it quietly famous across the Soviet Union, and you can still find old Chaika watches in the little shops if you enjoy that kind of hunt, which I shamelessly do.
Lia found a babushka selling smoked Volga fish from a bucket near the embankment and negotiated, in cheerful sign language, what turned out to be the best lunch of the whole trip. We ate it on a bench facing the water while a hydrofoil thumped past. No queue, no entrance fee, no audio guide. Just river, fish, and a town that has seen worse centuries than this one.
Going, practically
Uglich is awkward to reach by train, which is part of its charm; most people arrive by river cruise or by road from Yaroslavl, roughly two hours away. Give it a night rather than the standard two-hour shore stop. The light on the Volga in the early evening, with that red church glowing above the water, is worth missing the boat for.