Efremov is located in the south of the Tula region. The ancient city of the Zasechnaya Line, which became the center of the chemical industry in the 20th century. The city stands on the Krasivomeche River, and even has an unofficial name - the capital of Krasivomechye.
20 km from Efremov in the village of Barsukovo there is the
Meshchersky Arboretum, which presents an area of 320 hectares with more
than 2 thousand plant species.
Efremovsky district is rich in
attractions. The temple of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God and the
holy spring near it in the village of Turten are widely known in the
Tula region and beyond.
Not far from Efremov in 1380 there was a
battle between the Russians led by Prince Dmitry Ivanovich Don troops
and the Tatar Khan Mamai on the Kulikovo field, where the Museum of the
Battle of Kulikovo is now located.
50 km southwest of Efremov, but
already on the territory of the Oryol region, there was the Battle of
Sudbischi - a battle that took place on July 3-4 (June 24-25, new style)
1555 near the village of Sudbischi between the detachments of the
governor Ivan Sheremetyev and the Crimean Khan Devlet I Gireya. At that
time - the territory of the so-called Wild Field. Despite the
unsuccessful start of the battle for the Russians, through the efforts
of A. Basmanov and S. Sidorov, the Russian detachment eventually won.
During the campaign, a Crimean convoy was captured. A memorial monument
was created at the site of the battle in 1995.
25 km northeast of
Efremov, on the slope of the valley of the Beautiful Sword River near
the village of Kozyim, Efremov district, Tula region, is located the
famous Kon-Kamen throughout the district.
15 km from the city in the
village of Pozhilina, there is the Church of the Holy Great Martyr
Dmitry, born in 1845. Near the church there is the Levshin family crypt.
In 1879, Alexey Iraklievich Levshin, an outstanding Russian figure of
the 19th century, was buried there.
Not far from Efremov, in the
village of Kropotov-Lermontov, there was the estate of Mikhail Yuryevich
Lermontov’s father, which the poet visited several times. In 1941, the
Nazis destroyed the Lermontovs' house.
Volovo Lake is a lake of karst
origin in the Volovsky district of the Tula region. It is located in a
deep funnel-shaped basin on the Volovsky plateau of the Central Russian
Upland, 2 km east of the railway station on the Ozherelye - Yelets line
in the regional center - the urban village of Volovo. It has an oval
shape, a significant part is silted. It is the ancient source of the
Nepryadva River (the right tributary of the Don). After a strong
shallowing of the lake, the visible watercourse of Nepryadva begins only
near the village of Nikitsky. In the area of the lake, the dry ravine
network of the upper reaches of the river has been preserved.
The
city garden is the place where the residence of Ataman Ephraim was
located, and then the fort that gave rise to the city.
The house in
which the famous Soviet aircraft designer V. M. Myasishchev was born has
been preserved to this day. There is a store on the ground floor of the
house, and the second floor was residential until recently.
In the
building of the modern gymnasium (formerly secondary school No. 2), M.I.
Kalinin performed in 1918, as residents and guests of the city are told
about by a memorial plaque mounted on the pre-revolutionary building.
Efremov Museum of Art and Local Lore
The museum contains a wealth
of material about the history of the Efremov region, from ancient times
to the present day. The museum's exhibitions tell about fellow
countrymen - outstanding figures of science and art: Honored Artist of
the RSFSR L. M. Fetisova, People's Artist of the USSR, State Prize
laureate, composer and conductor K. K. Ivanov, famous aircraft designer
V. M. Myasishchev. The museum's funds contain a collection of paintings
by A.P. Gushchin, a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR. Numerous
exhibits collected by archaeological expeditions during excavations of
the river basin. The beautiful Sword confirms the presence of the
Sarmatian tribes in the IV-III centuries. BC e. on the territory of
modern Efremovsky region.
House-Museum of I. A. Bunin
In
Efremov there is a unique building - the only preserved memorial
house-museum of its kind, in which the great Russian writer, Nobel Prize
laureate Ivan Alekseevich Bunin lived and worked from time to time at
the beginning of the 20th century.
The house was built in 1880,
and in 1906 it was bought by the writer’s brother. The writer’s mother
spent the last years of her life in this house, buried in the old
cemetery in the city grove. The last time the writer was in Efremov was
in October 1917. In 1985, the literary department of the Efremov Museum
of Local Lore was opened in the house, which in 2001 received the status
of the house-museum of I. A. Bunin.
Synthetic Rubber Factory
Museum
The Khimik Palace of Culture houses a museum of the history of
the Efremov synthetic rubber plant.
Efremov Theological School
By decree of the Holy Synod of October
24, 1869, a theological school was opened in Efremov on January 18, 1870
(transferred from the Novosilsky Holy Spirit Monastery).
The
school was under the jurisdiction of the Department of Spiritual
Educational Affairs under the Holy Synod and the board of the Tula
Theological Seminary. It was a four-year lower theological educational
institution for training children of clergy, and according to the
curriculum it corresponded to the three junior classes of a classical
gymnasium.
On June 18, 1918, by decision of the Efremov district
executive committee, it was transformed into a men's gymnasium (school).
Currently - school No. 1.
Modernity
There are six churches
within the city limits:
Temple in honor of the icon of the Mother of
God “Seeking the Lost.” Address: 301840, Tula region, Efremov, st.
Dachnaya, 2.
The ensemble of churches of the Life-Giving Trinity and
St. Michael the Archangel: the Church of the Archangel Michael, the
Church of the Life-Giving Trinity, the chapel of the Smolensk Icon of
the Mother of God. Address: 301840, Tula region, Efremov, city garden.
St. Nicholas Church. Address: 301840, Tula region, Efremov, st.
Komsomolskaya, 19a.
Church of St. Matrona of Moscow (on the territory
of the “factory” hospital).
The city has a modern church in honor of
the icon of the Mother of God “Seeking the Lost.” Since January 2012,
after the division of the diocese, it has become the Cathedral.
Efremov is a major transport hub in the south of the Tula region.
By train
The Moscow-Donbass railway passes through the city. You
can get to Efremov station by diesel train from Uzlovaya (runs 3 times a
day).
By car
Efremov stands on the M4 Don federal highway.
After reconstruction, the route bypasses the city on the eastern side.
Efremov is also connected by the P141 highway with the M2 Crimea
highway, a local road with Orel, a P126 road with Ryazan through Dankov,
with Kurkin and Kulikovo Pol by a local road.
Founded in 1637 as a fortress, the name was given after the calendar personal name Ephraim. Since 1777 - the city of Efremov.
Efremov’s story is typical of many cities in the Black Earth Region and south Central Russia.
The appearance of a settled population on the territory of Efremov
dates back to the end of the 16th century. A few “willing people” were
engaged in beekeeping. This or that section of forest land was named
after the personal name or nickname of the owner. One of these areas was
the Efremovsky (Ofremovsky) forest. During the years of
military-agrarian colonization of the Black Earth Region territories in
the 17th century, the owner of the Efremovsky forest became the nobleman
Ivan Turgenev, who in the 1630s founded the village of Efremovskaya
(according to other sources, the village of Efremovskoye).
By
order of Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich in 1637, the Tula abatis line was
reconstructed, during which an oak fort was built in Efremovskaya. The
fortress was populated mainly by the children of boyars and city
Cossacks, who served as border guards and received estates in the
vicinity of the city for this. The influx of peasants to Efremov was
initially voluntary (residents of the towns had a number of tax
benefits). The Efremov fortress existed until the 1680s, after which the
dilapidated log walls were demolished.
In 1666, through Efremov,
the Cossack detachments of Stepan Razin’s future associate, Ataman
Vasily Us, passed “unauthorized” from Voronezh “to the sovereign’s
service” in Moscow.
Under Peter I, all the service people who inhabited the city, who
were not nobles, were transferred to the category of state peasants. The
lands they owned were gradually transferred to the ownership of
landowners, who settled them with serfs. During the preparation of the
Azov campaigns, convoys with ammunition and weapons for the flotilla
being built in Voronezh were pulled south through Efremov. Tsar Peter I
himself passed through the city with his associates. This is the first
head of state to visit Efremov.
On January 15, 1731, from local
single-lords and state-owned peasants - descendants of service people -
the Landmilitsky cavalry regiment of the Ukrainian Landmilitia was
formed, which on March 21, 1732 was settled in the Efremov fortress on
the Ukrainian line. From December 11, 1732 - Efremov Landmilitia
Regiment of the Ukrainian Landmilitia. On March 19, 1736, the regiment
became part of the Ukrainian Landmilitary Corps. On December 15, 1763,
the regiment was disbanded.
Administratively, from the moment
Peter created the province in 1708, Efremov became part of the Azov
province (in 1722, the Azov province was renamed Voronezh). When it was
divided into provinces in 1719, Efremov became a district town in the
Yelets province.
In 1777, Efremov was included in the Tula
governorate (province). In 1781, Efremovsky district was expanded to
include lands cut off from Yeletsky, Novosilsky, Donkovsky and Epifansky
districts.
On March 8, 1778, Catherine II approved the coat of
arms of the city of Efremov, which reflected the main thing in its
economy of that period (still in use today).
In 1779, the
reconstruction of the city began according to a regular plan with the
elimination of the suburban division that had persisted since the 17th
century. Since by this time Efremov was the center of an agricultural
region, the city’s coat of arms depicted “three silver plow coulters,
showing the practice of the people of this country in agriculture.” The
basis of the economy of Efremov (as well as other cities of the Black
Earth Region) was grain trade. Almost the entire serf population of the
Efremov district was employed in its production. Since 1765, in order to
reduce grain consumption by peasants, potatoes began to be introduced in
the district.
At the beginning of the 19th century, 1,816 people
lived in the city, mostly burghers. In 1827, M. Yu. Lermontov stayed in
Efremov, in a mansion owned by the Arsenyevs, located at the
intersection of the current K. Marx and Komsomolskaya streets, and on
May 16, 1830, the Russian poet, playwright and prose writer Alexander
Sergeevich Pushkin passed through the city, en route to Arzrum .
The appearance of manufactories and small factories in Efremov in the
1830s led to an increase in its population to 3 thousand people (1835).
There were 18 small enterprises in the city, producing beer, bricks,
soap, candles, wax, lard and leather; 83 people worked for them. After
the abolition of serfdom in 1861, many peasants from the poor and
agrarian overpopulated Efremov district began to go to work in Tula
factories, to Moscow, and moved to areas of new agricultural development
(Slobozhanshchina). After the construction of the Moscow - Tula - Orel -
Kursk railway in 1868-1869, Efremov began to quickly decline as grain
trade was reoriented towards rail transportation.
In 1874, the Tula-Elets railway passed through Efremov (it was
originally planned that the tracks would reach Voronezh, but this never
happened). The road revived grain trade and contributed to the
development of processing industries in the city - flour milling and
distillery. Other types of industrial activity did not develop in the
city; Efremovsky district remained an impoverished agricultural
hinterland. Grain trade in Efremov suffered greatly after Lebedyan,
Ranenburg and Dankov, located to the east, had their own railway
connections in 1890. In 1888, the local public bank was declared
bankrupt, in 1891-1892 and in 1898 there was mass famine in Efremov and
the district.
The city is mentioned in the stories of I. A.
Bunin, I. S. Turgenev, L. N. Tolstoy, K. G. Paustovsky.
The 1897
census counted 9,038 people in Efremov (in 1861 there were 10.5
thousand), more than a third of whom were peasants. Of the 1,221
residential buildings in the city, three quarters were wooden. Small
enterprises in the city and county employed 892 people, with an average
of 15 people per plant. In the same 1897, the building of the religious
school (now secondary school No. 1) was laid. In the 1900s, the city's
territory was improved: street lighting appeared, a water supply system
was built, and a cinema was opened in 1909. By 1914, the population of
Efremov had reached 14.5 thousand people; the predominant type of
building was two-story houses with a brick first floor and a wooden
second floor, covered with tin sheets. Retail trade was actively
developing in the city, the main shopping streets were Podyacheskaya,
Dvoryanskaya and Moskovskaya (now Krasnoarmeyskaya, Karla Marx and
Sverdlova, respectively).
A separate ethnographic group of
Russians, the Novosilsk Cossacks, still lives on the territory of the
former Efremovsky district, which is confirmed by research conducted at
the beginning of the 20th century by the famous linguist professor E.F.
Budde, St. Petersburg ethnographer N.M. Mogilyansky and Novosilsk
writer, ethnographer and local historian V.N. Glagolev, as well as other
sources.
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, local
self-government began to actively develop in Russia, and the city of
Efremov is no exception. In 1864, the Efremov district zemstvo assembly
was created. One of the first decisions adopted by the district zemstvo
assembly was “A petition for the construction of a railway from the city
of Yelets to its connection with the Oryol-Tula railway” (1866).
In the last years of the existence of the Efremov district zemstvo
assembly, a great contribution to the development was made by: A. A.
Arsenyev, Prince A. N. Lobanov-Rostovsky, D. D. Obolensky, P. I.
Shakhovskoy In connection with the October Revolution of 1917, the
Efremov district zemstvo the meeting ceased to exist.
The Efremov
district zemstvo assembly was located on the corner of Gogol and
Bolshaya Moskovskaya streets (now Sverdlova street). The building has
survived to this day and is an architectural monument.
On January 16 (29), 1918, Soviet power was established in Efremov and
Efremov district.
After the establishment of Soviet power,
Efremov became a stronghold for grain procurements to supply food to the
workers of Tula. Attempts to carry out food appropriation in the county
were sabotaged by local authorities, since the poor county itself was in
dire need of grain. During the peasant uprising of 1919, the local
garrison refused to suppress it and was replaced by troops from Tula.
The city's economy fell into decline; by 1926, 10 thousand people lived
in Efremov - a third less than in 1914. The city's food industry
partially revived during the NEP, but could not develop due to a
shortage of raw materials - due to extreme poverty and agricultural
overpopulation, agriculture became semi-subsistence; a third of farms
did not have horses.
After collectivization, the main industry of
the city became the processing of potatoes and grain into ethyl alcohol
(industrial production was created in 1934). In 1933, a synthetic rubber
plant was launched in Efremov, operating on ethyl alcohol for the first
decades. To supply the plant with electricity, the Efremovskaya CHPP was
built, and the railway (Moscow-Donbass highway) was reconstructed. A
centralized service sector is developing in the city, the population of
Efremov is growing (26.7 thousand in 1939).
From November 3 to November 13, 1941, during the battles in the Teply
area, the German 53rd Army Corps, with the support of the tank brigade
of G. Eberbach, drove the Soviet troops back to Efremov, capturing more
than 3,000 prisoners and a significant number of guns.
On
November 20, 1941, the German 18th Panzer Division, after stubborn
street fighting, occupied the city of Efremov and held it, despite
counterattacks by Soviet troops.
Liberated on December 13, 1941
during the Yeletsk operation by units of the 283rd Rifle Division
(commander - Colonel A. N. Nechaev) and the 6th Guards Rifle Division
(commander - Major General K. I. Petrov), operating as part of the 3rd
th Army of the Southwestern Front.
In the post-war years, the industrialization of Efremov continued. In the early 1960s, using the Komsomol construction method, the first stage of production of synthetic rubber SKD was built and launched at the Order of the Red Banner of Labor synthetic rubber plant named after Academician Lebedev, and in the mid-1970s the second stage of production of synthetic rubber SKD was built and launched. In 1970, the industrial alcohol plant was transformed into a biochemical plant. In 1982, the Efremov chemical plant was launched, producing sulfuric acid and mineral fertilizers. In the early 1980s, the Efremovsky glucose-molasses plant was built and put into operation, next to which a new microdistrict was erected. In the 1960-1970s. Due to the increase in the city's population, three microdistricts of standard five-story buildings were built (1st, 2nd and 3rd microdistricts), and the city center was reconstructed. In 1985, the Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhgorod gas pipeline passed through Efremov. In the second half of the 1980s, the South-Western microdistrict was built.
The area under public gardens and parks has increased at least ten
times compared to pre-revolutionary times. Asphalting the streets and
regularly watering them in the summer did away with dust.
According to the general plan, revised in 1966, the quarters of the
historical part of the city were enlarged by eliminating small cross
streets. Freer development with several nine-story buildings shaped and
made the appearance of the city much more expressive on the southern
side. Historically significant buildings were preserved and taken under
protection.
With the beginning of the 9th Five-Year Plan (1970),
the city stepped beyond the Mecha to the Yelets side. On its right bank,
behind the green belt of collective gardens, a new large enterprise was
founded near Inozemka - a glucose and syrup plant. Next to it in the
southern industrial zone there are a number of other significant
facilities: a plant for microbiological plant protection products, a
house-building plant, and a base for the production of non-standard
sanitary equipment.
In the old, northern industrial zone there is
a plant for synthetic rubber products, a bakery, a dairy, an
experimental mechanical plant for the production of non-standard
equipment and other enterprises.
Another new residential
neighborhood has emerged near Bogovo.
The city is located on the Krasivaya Mecha River (a tributary of the
Don), 318 km south of Moscow and 144 km from Tula on the Moscow-Donbass
railway (Efremov station of the Moscow Railway).
The city of
Efremov, like the entire Tula region, is located in a time zone
designated by international standard as the Moscow Time Zone (MSK). The
offset relative to UTC is +3:00.
The climate of Efremov is moderate continental, characterized by warm, long summers and moderately cold winters with frequent thaws. The average temperature in January, the coldest month of the year, according to 1981–2010 standards is −6.8 °C; July, the warmest month, is +19.8 °C. The average annual temperature in the city is +6 °C. The annual precipitation rate is about 600 mm. The predominant wind directions are westerly, southwest and south.
In the summer of 1823, Alexander Sergeevich Griboedov came to
Efremovsky district, where he lived in the estate of D. N. Begichev.
Here he created Acts III and IV of the comedy “Woe from Wit.”
In
1857, L. N. Tolstoy (1828-1910), one of the most widely known Russian
writers and thinkers, stayed in Efremov. A memorial plaque hung on the
building where he stayed for many years. In recent years, the building
has been abandoned, is in disrepair and is being demolished.
In 1915,
Konstantin Georgievich Paustovsky (1892-1968) first came to Efremov.
During the Soviet years, Paustovsky and his wife Ekaterina often came to
Efremov. He and his seven-year-old son Vadim spent the summer of 1924 in
the village of Bogovo, where Paustovsky met a retired colonel of the
tsarist army, who served as his prototype for the story “The Old Man in
a Shabby Overcoat.” The former colonel loved to fish on the Beautiful
Sword. After the war, Paustovsky came to Efremov to visit the grave of
Bunin’s mother.
In April 1919, Alexander Mikhailovich Vasilevsky was
drafted into the Red Army and sent to the 4th reserve battalion, to the
position of platoon instructor (assistant platoon commander). A month
later, he was sent as the commander of a detachment of 100 people to the
Stupinsky volost of the Efremov district of the Tula province to assist
in the implementation of surplus appropriation and the fight against
gangs.
Since 1999, the city has hosted a football tournament named
after the Honored Master of Sports of the USSR, bronze medalist of the
1980 Moscow Olympics, midfielder of the USSR national football team
(1979-1990) Fyodor Cherenkov, who has repeatedly come to this tournament
as an honorary guest. The tournament usually begins with the granting of
the honorary right to first hit the ball to Fyodor Cherenkov (in 2009,
in honor of the tenth anniversary of the tournament, this right was
granted to the former governor of the Tula region Vyacheslav Dudka and
Fyodor Cherenkov jointly).