Yekaterinburg once minted most of Russia’s coins
Founded in 1723 and named for Catherine I, this Ural crossroads was Peter the Great’s ironworks city. In the nineteenth century it dug nearly half the world’s gold and struck four-fifths of the empire’s circulating coins—before a Soviet renaming to Sverdlovsk and a return to the empress’s name.
Yekaterinburg (also Ekaterinburg), formerly Sverdlovsk from 1924 to 1991, serves as the seat of Sverdlovsk Oblast and of Russia’s Ural Federal District, straddling Europe and Asia. Vasily Tatishchev and Georg Wilhelm de Gennin founded it on 18 November 1723 under Peter the Great’s mining decrees, naming the ironworks town for Empress Catherine I. It became a minting and metal hub, later a revolutionary centre, and in the twenty-first century an economic boomtown that hosted 2018 World Cup matches and a reputation for constructivist buildings and street art.
Mesolithic camps from 8000–7000 BC and the Neolithic Isetskoe Pravoberezhnoye site (6000–5000 BC) show deep prehistory; railway digs later filled local museums. Russian settlement intensified in the late seventeenth century near Lake Shartash. Peter’s 1720 commission under Johann Blüher and Tatishchev reorganised Ural mining; the Verkhne-Uktussky plant of 1722–1726, dedicated to princess Elizabeth, was later absorbed into the city.
From 1820 through 1845 this Ural city yielded roughly forty-five percent of all gold dug worldwide; until 1876 its mint struck about four-fifths of the coins then circulating across the Russian Empire. After the October Revolution, Nicholas II’s family was imprisoned in the Ipatiev House here—events that still shadow the city’s memory even as factories, universities, and murals define its modern brand. Gold, coinage, and later World Cup stadiums mark a factory town that still sits on the continental divide.
Source: Yekaterinburg
