Tomsk

The Wooden City

Tomsk has a problem and it is one of the most photogenic problems in Russia. The city contains hundreds of nineteenth-century wooden houses — two and three stories, elaborate carved window frames, facades washed in faded blues and greens and ochres — and many of them are slowly subsiding into the Siberian ground. Preservation efforts exist and are ongoing and are visibly insufficient. Walking the Tatarskaya Sloboda district, you pass houses that are tilting, houses that are structurally compromised, houses abandoned to settle slowly into the earth, and houses that have been beautifully restored and turned into small museums.

The effect is elegiac and urgent at the same time. I spent most of a morning photographing facades that may not be standing in ten years, which gives the architecture a quality that perfectly intact historic districts don’t have. Impermanence concentrates attention.

A University Town

Six universities for a city of six hundred thousand: Tomsk punches far above its weight academically, and the student population shapes it in visible ways. Coffee shops stay open late. Used bookstores exist in numbers that require explanation. The central market sells everything from smoked fish to phone cases in the same covered hall that’s been operating since the 1870s.

Tomsk State University, founded in 1878, was the first university in Siberia. The campus sits in a park of birch trees that in autumn turns gold all at once, as if someone gave a signal. I walked through it on a weekday afternoon and watched students moving between buildings with the particular purposeful casualness of people who have interesting things to think about. The botanical garden attached to the university is genuine — serious plant collections, old glasshouses, a pond with ducks that seemed untroubled by the October temperature.

Resurrection Cathedral and the Hill

The Resurrection Cathedral sits on Voskresenskaya Gora — Resurrection Hill — above the Tom River, and from the hill you can see the city spreading across the flood plain in all directions. The view in winter, with smoke from every chimney and river ice catching low afternoon sun, is the kind of image that makes a place legible. You understand the scale, the relationship between the settled parts and the forest just beyond.

The cathedral itself is painted in colors Siberia seems to favor — white with green accents, baroque details executed with provincial gusto. Services were running when I visited. The incense smell followed me out and mixed with the cold air in a combination that belongs specifically to Orthodox churches in cold countries.

Evening Along Lenina

Prospekt Lenina is the main pedestrian artery, and in the evening it fills with people doing the Russian promenade — walking slowly, in pairs and groups, dressed with a seriousness of purpose I find admirable. There are good Georgian restaurants on the streets off Lenina. There is a craft brewery I found by following a group of students. There is a jazz bar in a basement that had a musician playing standards with genuine command and maybe seven other people in the audience, which felt less like a bad night for the bar and more like a private performance.

When to go: May and June for birch trees leafing out and manageable temperatures. September and October for autumn color in the university park and the full academic-year atmosphere. February for the carved wooden houses under fresh snow, which is the definitive image of Tomsk. Mid-July can be warm and pleasant but some students leave and the city loses a dimension.