Tyumen: the Gate to Siberia

Today we drive out from Tyumen to the amazing sites of the Tyumen region. After breakfast and check-out at the hotel, we will head to Pokrovskoye village. There you can visit Grigory Rasputin’s museum. The museum keeps a unique collection of personal belongings of Rasputin’s family (tableware, furniture, icons, Rasputin’s diary, and letters), and offers an excursion devoted to Grigory Rasputin who was a close friend of the emperor Nicholas II and whose life and death are still covered with mystery.

Our next destination is the city with a fascinating skyline – Tobolsk. Everyone who was in Tobolsk would be impressed by its white-stone Kremlin, located at the high bank of the Irtysh River. As you know, Tobolsk is the only city in the Urals with a stone Kremlin. We will visit the Kremlin and enjoy the view of St. Sophia, the oldest cathedral of the city. Later you will be transferred to the hotel for overnight.

We will start the third day with the Tobolsk sightseeing tour. After breakfast, we will visit the Museum of Prison. The Tobolsk Prison was built in the 19th century and kept functioning in the Soviet period till 1989. It was a place of exile of the famous Decembrists, the greatest Russian writer Dostoevsky in the 19th century, and of many political prisoners in the 20th century, one of them was the outstanding writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Afterward, you will get acquainted with the history of the Governor’s Palace (outside), the place of exile of the last Russian emperor Nicholas II and his family. Later, you will visit the Tobolsk factory and see artistic bone-cutting products – the only operating enterprise of this type in Russia. In the afternoon we will have a transfer to Tyumen where we will spend the last night of our tour.