Orenburg state university

Culture and sights

Orenburg is proud with its theatres: the Drama Theatre, the Musical Comedy Theatre, the Tatar Drama Theatre, and the Puppet Show Theatre. Orenburg is also home to the Orenburg State Academic Russian Folk Choir.

There are a lot of people who were born here or visited our town and contributed a lot to its development and prosperity. Citizens keep fond memories about them by opening memorial museums.

Among them is the Taras Shevchenko memorial museum that introduces its visitors to the life in Orenburg of a famous Ukraine poet Taras Shevchenko.

The family of a world famous cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (1927 2007) was evacuated to Orenburg from Moscow in 1941 during the World War II. Now the house where the family stayed got the status of the museum.

Yuriy Gagarin, the first world cosmonaut studied at the Orenburg flying school and got married in Orenburg. The apartment where the young couple stayed for a while after Gagarin’s graduation remains a unique place to visit and touch the epoch’s history.

The House of Memory is the one and only project in Russia aiming at remembering all citizens who lived in the city. Opened 5 years ago, the House has a full collection of citizens who has gone.

The historical downtown is the Sovetskaya street. It is a pedestrian zone with lots of shops, cafes and restaurants. It ends up with one of the most popular places in Orenburg – with the boulevard on the embankment of the Ural River. The place is called Belovka after a 19th century local merchant Belov, who gave money to renovate the quay and the Sovetskaya Street.

In the Sovetskaya street one can see the Orenburg Regional Studies Museum. Next year museum will celebrate 180 anniversary. Its expositions take us back to the history of Orenburg region and its flora and fauna. The museum also disposes a unique collection of sarmats and skiffs items. Being nomads this ancient tribes lived in the Orenburg steppes.

Another building in the Sovetskaya street is the Gostiny Dvor (name of several shopping centres and historical buildings). In old times it was a sort of a market place where merchants from Asia brought their goods for sail. During the Soviet times the building housed a silk production plant but now the Gostiny Dvor is the biggest shopping centre again.

Thousands of our citizens took part in the World War II. Their names are commemorated by several monuments in the city and the biggest of them is the "Salute, the Victory!" park. It is an open air exhibition of military arms used by the Soviet army during the war. In the centre of the park one can see an eternal flame.