Ivan the Terrible's 1574 fort became oil-rich Ufa
Capital of Russia's Bashkortostan, Ufa sits where the Belaya meets the Ufa River west of the southern Urals, with well over a million residents. A fortress rose in 1574 by Ivan the Terrible's order; it became Ufa Governorate capital in 1865. Oil refining, chemicals, and engineering dominate, with Bashneft based there.
Medieval mapmakers may have known this spot before Moscow did. The Pizzigano brothers' map of 1367 and the Catalan Atlas of 1375 mark a town near the Belaya called Pascherti, meaning Bashkort, and Mercator repeated the name in 1554; the orientalist Henri Cordier placed it where Ufa stands. Ibn Khaldun counted Bashkort among the Golden Horde's largest towns. In 2014 two Bashkir researchers argued that Turkic tribes had a hilltop sanctuary here for sacrifices to the sky god Tengri, called Upe or Ufe, and that the Russians borrowed the name.
The official story starts in 1574, when Ivan the Terrible's fortress went up on a hill called Tura-Tau; town status followed in 1586. Ufa was governed from Orenburg until it became seat of its own governorate in 1781, and by 1802 it was the centre of a territory covering much of today's Bashkortostan plus Orenburg and Chelyabinsk regions. The river's own name is disputed; one Russian linguist traced it to an Iranian word for water, and Bashkir spelling earns the city the joking title City of Three Screws.
A river waterway in 1870 and the Samara–Zlatoust railway in 1890 tied it to European Russia, and Soviet factories evacuated east in 1941 turned it into an industrial base. The population passed a million in 1980. On 4 June 1989, about 75 km away, a gas pipeline leak near the tracks was ignited by sparks from a passing train's brakes, and the explosion killed 575 people.
Today it ranks tenth among Russian cities, with some 200 large and medium factories, three Bashneft refineries and petrochemical plants, and an engine works building gas turbines. It hosted BRICS and Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summits in 2015. A metro has been promised since the late 1980s and formally launched in 1996 in the presence of Boris Yeltsin, yet it remains unbuilt. Temperatures have ranged from −48.5 °C in 1979 to 39.4 °C in 2023.
Source: Ufa
