Orenburg state university

Culture and Sights

Orenburg is the proud host of many theatres: the Drama Theatre, the Musical Comedy Theatre, the Tatar Drama Theatre, and the Puppet Show Theatre. Orenburg is also home to the Orenburg State Academic Russian Folk Choir.

There are a lot of people who were either born in Orenburg or visited our town, and contributed a lot to its development and prosperity. Citizens keep fond memories of them by opening memorial museums.

Among them is the Taras Shevchenko Memorial Museum that introduces its visitors to the lifeof a famous Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko in Orenburg.

The family of a world famous cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (1927–2007) was evacuated to Orenburg from Moscow in 1941 during World War II. Now the house where the family stayed is a museum for visitors.

Yuri Gagarin, the world’s first cosmonaut studied at the Orenburg Flying School and got married in Orenburg. The apartment where the young couple stayed after Gagarin’s graduation remains a unique place to visit and touch the epoch’s history.

The House of Memory is the one and only landmark in Russia aiming at remembering all citizens who have inhabited the city. It opened 5 years ago, and the House has a full collection of citizens who have lived and gone in Orenburg.

The historical downtown is Sovetskaya Street. It is a pedestrian zone with lots of shops, cafes, and restaurants. It ends atone of the most popular places in Orenburg — the boulevard on the embankment of the Ural River. The place is called Belovka after a 19^th century local merchant Belov, who gave money to renovate the quay and Sovetskaya Street.

On Sovetskaya street one can see the Orenburg Regional Studies Museum. Next year the museum will celebrate their 180^th anniversary. Their exposition takes us back to the history of the Orenburg region and its flora and fauna. The museum also displays a unique collection of sarmats and skiffs’ items due to the nomads of these ancient tribes living in the Orenburg steppes.

Another building on Sovetskaya Street is the Gostiny Dvor (name of several shopping centers and historical buildings). In old times it was a sort of a market place where merchants from Asia brought their goods to sell. During the Soviet times the building housed a silk production plant, but now the Gostiny Dvor is the biggest shopping center again.

Thousands of our citizens took part in World War II. Their names are commemorated by several monuments in the city and the biggest of them is the "Salute, the Victory!" park. It is an open air exhibition of military arms used by the Soviet army during the war. At the center of the park one can see an eternal flame burning in commemoration of these veterans.

Presentation "Orenburg in the ABC’S"