Golden Ring of Russia

The idea of the route and the term was created in 1967 by Soviet historian and essayist Yuri Bychkov, who published in Sovetskaya Kultura in November–December 1967 a series of essays on the cities under the heading: "Golden Ring".

[2] Bychkov was one of the founders of ВООПИК: the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Monuments of History and Culture (these letters in Romanized form are VOOPIK).

The towns have been called "open-air museums" and feature unique monuments of Russian architecture of the 12th–18th centuries, including kremlins, monasteries, cathedrals, and churches.

[7][8]Now the main and most popular tourist route around provincial cities of central European Russia,[9] the promotion of the Golden Ring was a new challenge after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

From a sustainability standpoint, there were new goals that needed to be achieved: the preservation of ancient architectural monuments, modernising the tourism industry within new capitalist system, building new types of infrastructures such as hotels, theme parks, museums and malls that encouraged economic growth.

Kostroma is one of the cities which belongs to the Golden Ring of Russia . The city was an important trading city in ancient Rus. [ 4 ] Photo of the Ipatievsky Monastery , 2009
The Resurrection Church of Kostroma (1652) is a superb example of the 17th-century Russian art (color photograph, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii , 1910, Library of Congress )