Kudymkar is a city in the Perm region of Russia, the
administrative center of the Komi-Permyak district. It has the
status of a city of regional significance and an urban district.
Kudymkar arose no later than the 15th century as a Komi-Permyak
settlement. It was first mentioned as a village in 1579. In the 18th
century it came into the possession of the Stroganovs. In 1925,
Kudymkar became the center of the Komi-Permyak National District. In
1938 it received city status. The population is mixed, two thirds
are Russian, a third are Komi-Permyaks, but most local Russians have
Komi-Permyak roots. Kudymkar is the only city in the Komi-Permyak
Okrug and is its economic and cultural center. It houses scientific
and educational institutions studying the Komi-Permyak language and
culture, as well as the Komi-Permyak Drama Theater. The city,
although it is built up mainly with “standard” private houses and
five-story buildings, is not devoid of national flavor. In recent
years, a number of art objects on ethnic themes have appeared here,
as well as restaurants with national cuisine, which is rare for the
Finno-Ugric regions of Russia. There are no iconic sights here, but
it’s worth spending half a day in the city getting to know the
Komi-Permyak culture.
There are no more than a dozen pre-revolutionary buildings left in
Kudymkar, and not much more buildings from the Stalin period. The center
of the city is dominated by five-story buildings made of white sand-lime
brick, and the difference between Kudymkar and several hundred other
small towns in Russia is that both these five-story buildings and later
buildings are decorated with national ornaments.
1 St. Nicholas
Church, Sovetskaya st., 33. The church was built from 1786 to 1804 with
the money of Alexander Stroganov. This is a fairly standard classicism
for that time, but there is nothing else like it in Kudymkar.
2 District Administration of the Stroganovs, st. Sovetskaya, 36. The
oldest civilian building in the city, built in 1836. Nowadays the police
are located here.
3 Okrispolkom, st. 50 years of October, 30. The
former building of the district executive committee, built in the late
1930s in the constructivist style.
4 Alley Kudym-Osha, between
Kalinin and Likhachev streets. An alley with modern stone and wooden
sculptures based on Komi-Permyak mythology.
1 Komi-Permyak Museum of Local Lore (8 March St., 27). ☎ +7 (34260)
4-50-91. 11:00-18:00 (except Mondays and the first Friday of the month).
110 rub. The exhibition occupies 4 floors. In the basement there is a
"children's" museum, on the 1st floor there is an exhibition on
archeology, history and ethnography, on the 2nd floor - nature, on the
3rd floor - art exhibitions. There is a kiosk with souvenirs and local
history literature.
2 Komi-Permyak Drama Theatre, st. Gagarina, 6.
The theater, founded back in the 1930s, is located in a new building,
huge for such a small city. Performances based on the works of
Komi-Permyak authors, as well as Russian and world classics are
regularly staged.
3 House-Museum of P.I. Subbotin-Permyak, st.
Kirova, 23. House-museum of the Komi-Permyak artist and public figure
Subbotin-Permyak. It works only by prior request, but is also
interesting from the outside, as a good example of a pre-revolutionary
wooden city house.
By plane
The nearest airport is in Perm.
By train
There
is no railway in Kudymkar. The nearest railway station is Mendeleevo,
located on the Kirov-Perm line, 100 km south of Kudymkar. Electric
trains and only a few long-distance trains stop there. Buses connecting
Perm with Kudymkar do not call at the station itself, but stop at a
bypass 2 km to the north. Despite this, in some cases Mendeleevo may be
convenient for getting to Kudymkar.
By car
The main highway
connecting Kudymkar with other cities branches off from the M7 highway
between Ocher and Krasnokamsk. The road is completely asphalted and
maintained in near perfect condition. If you are coming from Kirov, then
you need to turn onto the Kudymkar highway near the village of Karagay.
There is also a road from Kudymkar to Berezniki, but about a quarter of
its length is not paved. This road is maintained in a passable condition
for passenger cars and is regularly repaired. If you have a bit of
adventurism, you can get to Kudymkar from the north - there is a road
from the Komi Republic through Koygorodok - Kazhym - Ust-Chernaya -
Gayny. Between Kazhym and Ust-Chernaya the road is in poor condition,
but in dry weather it is passable for all types of cars, but in muddy
weather there is nothing to do there without all-wheel drive.
By
bus
Kudymkar is best connected by buses to Perm. Buses run along this
route from morning to evening approximately every hour, the journey
takes 3.5-4 hours. Also, buses run from Kudymkar to Berezniki twice a
day; the journey takes 5 hours.
Bus station, st. Danilova, 13. A
large building, where in addition to the cash registers there is a
buffet, toilets, luggage storage, kiosks with goods for travel and rooms
for long rest. All buses to Perm, Berezniki and around the district
(except for the closest suburb) depart from here.
There are several city bus routes in Kudymkar, but for tourists they are generally useless, because all tourist sites are located in the center within walking distance of each other.
In Kudymkar you can buy knitted products (socks, mittens, rugs) with national patterns. However, they differ little from the same ones manufactured in other parts of the Russian North and the Urals.
A rare case for the Finno-Ugric territories of Russia - in Kudymkar
you can taste the national cuisine without any problems. The
Komi-Permyaks have always lived poorly, the soils in these places are
infertile, so the cuisine is “simple”, the gifts of the forest play an
important role - mushrooms, berries, wild plants. A distinctive feature
of Komi-Permyak cuisine is the use of young sprouts of horsetail, here
they are called “pistikas”. Pies (you can buy them at local bakeries),
dumplings and other dishes are made with pistikas. The national light
alcoholic drink is “sur” - something like beer. National dishes are
served in two restaurants in the city, both of which have very
reasonable prices.
1 National, st. Likhacheva, 52. Restaurant of
Komi-Permyak cuisine.
2 Permyak, st. Kalinina, 53A. Cafe of
Komi-Permyak cuisine. The selection is a little smaller than in a
restaurant, and the prices are a little lower.
In addition to
national restaurants, Kudymkar has several canteens and cafes with
regular Soviet or Caucasian cuisine, as well as the ubiquitous take-away
coffee, pizza, rolls and burgers.
Cheap
Hostel at the bus station. Long rest rooms on the 3rd floor
of the bus station. Cheap and cheerful.
Hostel No. 1, st. Maxim
Gorky, 38. ☎ +7 (92230) 2-87-64. Hostel with multi-bed and double rooms.
Average cost
Hotel "Parma", st. 50 years of October, 42. ☎ +7
(34260) 4-59-97. "Main" city hotel with rooms of different categories.
Hotel "Makhaon", st. Stroiteley 4A. ☎ +7 (952) 334-38-39. Small private
hotel. Reviews are contradictory.
The name of the city came from the Komi words and had in the past the name "Kudyn kor", since in ancient times the settlement on the site of the city stood near the river "Kuva", translated from the Komi language as "kuv va" or "dead water", and the word "kar" from the Permian Komi language it is translated as “settlement, city”, the name “Kudym kar” is translated from the Permian Komi language as “a city near the Kuva river”. After the creation of the Komi-Perm district and the introduction of the Komi-Zyryan standards into the Komi-Perm literary language, the Permian Komi word "kor" in the name was replaced by its Zyryan version of "kar", since then the city was renamed into Kudymkar.
It is located on both banks of the Inva (a tributary of the Kama) and partly on the left bank of its tributary Kuva, in the most developed southern part of the district on the Gainy-Mendeleevo highway, 201 km from Perm.
Since
the 7th century, the center of the future city was occupied by the
Kudymkarskoye settlement ("Krasnaya Gorka").
In written
sources, Kudymkar was first mentioned in 1579. In 1472, Kudymkar,
together with the Great Perm, became part of the Moscow
principality. In the 17th century, Kudymkar turns into the center of
the region.
In 1908, 1192 residents lived in Kudymkar, it was
the residence of the head of the 3rd camp of the Solikamsk district
of the Perm province, which included the territory of the modern
Kudymkar district and the adjacent parts of the Yusvinsky and
Karagai districts. There was a 4-grade city school, a zemstvo
women's school, a library-reading room, a hospital, a post office
and a veterinary center; a mill with a dam on Kuva, forestry,
consumer society, orphanage, almshouse; 3 annual fairs and weekly
trades were held. In 1909 a post and telegraph office was opened.
In 1931 the village of Kudymkar was transformed into an
urban-type settlement. On July 10, 1938, the urban-type settlement
received the city status.
In 1927, a pedagogical technical
school (later - a school) was opened, in 1929 - a forestry
(originally a department of a technical school) and in 1930 - an
agricultural technical school, in 1930 - a medical assistant school
(later a medical school).
In the postwar period, a number of
vocational schools were opened in Kudymkar. In the late 1920s - the
first half of the 1930s, small enterprises were founded here for the
production of products and goods for the local economy and the
population: iron foundry and blacksmithing, woodworking and flax
processing, leather and footwear, brick, butter, starch and treacle,
confectionery, oil mill , wine and non-alcoholic, flour-grinding
with an elevator and a bakery in the village of Yurino on the right
bank of the Inva, south of the main core of Kudymkar. In Kudymkar in
1936 the Komipermles trust was created, which in 1937 founded the
Central repair and mechanical workshops, now a plant. In 1931-1994.
the gravel road Mendeleevo - Kudymkar is being built, giving access
to the main railway.
Until December 1, 2005, Kudymkar was the
administrative center of the constituent entity of the Russian
Federation of the Komi-Permyak Autonomous Okrug.
The largest enterprises:
OJSC "Milk" (dairy products) and OJSC
"Meat Processing Plant", which stand out sharply in terms of product
cost, together with bread, food and fruit processing plants, provide 2/3
of Kudymkar's total production in monetary terms.
Until the 1990s
of the 20th century. the largest enterprise was the electrical
instrument plant (a branch of the Perm Instrument-Making Association),
in the 2000s it was closed and dismantled (staff in the early 1990s -
1200 people - 1/3 of all workers in the Kudymkar industry (the only one
was not associated with other industries material production of the
district).
The financial situation of city enterprises is more
favorable than in rural areas. Kudymkar is a distribution center for
electricity supplied via two power lines-110 from Perm and sent from
local substations to the district areas.
Retail turnover, the
volume of sales of household services on average per 1 resident is
higher than the regional average level. A third of all cars in the
district that are personally owned by citizens are concentrated here.
In Kudymkar there are 4 secondary schools (No. 1, 2, 5, 8) and one
gymnasium (former school No. 3), 2 lyceums, an agricultural and forestry
technical school, a medical school, a pedagogical college, and branches
of the USFTU. Children's art school, 2 Houses of Culture, 7 clubs,
Komi-Permyak National Drama Theater named after. M. Gorky, Park of
Culture and Leisure named after I. Ya. Krivoshchekov; The construction
of a unique cultural center with a large auditorium and numerous rooms
for artistic groups was completed.
The children's and youth
sports school offers ski jumping (ski jump complex), skiing, athletics
(Parma stadium), sambo wrestling, boxing, weightlifting and other
sports. At the end of 2008, the city's first swimming pool was
commissioned.
There are a district hospital, city and dental
clinics, anti-tuberculosis, skin and venereological, physical education
clinics, women's and children's clinics, district and city sanitary and
epidemiological stations. In the field of health care, many indicators
are higher than the regional average (provision of hospital beds,
doctors, etc.).
In 1988, the Komi-Permyak Research Department of
Social Sciences of the Institute of Language, Literature and History of
the Komi Scientific Center of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of
Sciences was opened in Kudymkar, consisting of groups: language,
literature and folklore, archeology and ethnography, history; a
comprehensive program for the development of Komi-Permyak national
culture is being developed; connections are established with scientific
institutions of the Finno-Ugric peoples. Since 1992, the television and
radio committee has been operating on the basis of radio and television
transmitters operating in the Kudymkar region. There are architectural
monuments - the building of the former Stroganov office and St. Nicholas
Cathedral (XVIII century).
Since December 4, 1944, the
Komi-Permyak Institute for Teacher Improvement has been operating.
Today, the institute has three departments: pedagogy and psychology,
preschool and primary education, and humanities. The developments and
materials of the institute’s methodologists arouse the interest of the
scientific world of other regions and are published in regional and
national publications. Continuous work is being carried out to form a
diagnostic, analytical, projective culture of teachers, taking into
account modern requirements for education.