May 15 - Our port for the next two days is Yaroslavl. This town of 640,000 covers 130 square miles. Yaroslavl was founded in 1010 when Prince Yaroslavl came to this part of the river to establish a church.
The mascot of the city is a bear. The legend that led to this is about the time when Prince Yaroslavl came to this area to protect his father's merchant ships from the pillaging pagans, he ventured ashore to reason with the marauders. They captured him and threw him to a hungry bear to end this foolishness. However they were astonished when Prince Yaroslavl killed the bear with an ax. He then ordered his new found "friends" to build a church and named the city after himself. Legend or truth - you will have to decide for yourself.
The first church we went to see was Church of Assumption. It had five domes and we learned that a five domed church represents Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Jesus. If a cathedral has three domes, they represent the Trinity, and if it has seven or more domes they represent the nine levels to heaven or levels of angels. It had a statue of three travelers outside to tell the story and represent the story of Abraham and Sarah.
We walked around the village a little and saw the Church of Elijah the Prophet. This church was built in 1647 by a rich Russian family and is excellently preserved. It is an active practicing Russian Orthodox Church. We then went to the city museum. Our guide was dressed in period costume and gave us a tour of her "father's"home. She told us three of her father's favorite riddles, taught us the language of flowers, and the language of a ladies fan. I picked the chrysanthemum which means wisdom. Evelyn picked the iris which stood for friendship. One of the riddles was : What do you have that does you no good, but if you don't have it you can have anything? Answer: Money
We ended our city tour by going to the local market. Unfortunately for us they close at five and that's when we arrived, so many of the shops were in the process of closing, but the wise ones stayed open until we left as there were many shoppers in our group.
To sum up Yaroslavl, it is a city of firsts. It is the home of the first woman astronaut in Russia, it had first tire factory, it had the first synthetic tire factory in Russia and they used potatoes to make the synthetic tires, it had the first theatre in Russia, the first fortress in Russia, the first center of Christianity in Russia, and it had the first provincial newspaper. That's a lot of firsts for city.