page_title: Kostroma
section_title: Sights and landmarks
hierarchical_section_title: Kostroma / Sights and landmarks
caption_attribution_description: The Ipatievsky monastery in Kostroma contains buildings from 16th to 19th centuries.
context_page_description: Kostroma is a historic city and the administrative center of Kostroma Oblast, Russia. A part of the Golden Ring of Russian towns, it is located at the confluence of the rivers Volga and Kostroma. Population: 268,742; 278,750; 278,414.
context_section_description: Built in 1559-1565, the five-domed Epiphany Cathedral was the first stone edifice in the city; its medieval frescoes perished during a fire several years ago. The minster houses the city's most precious relic, a 10th-century Byzantine icon called Our Lady of St. Theodore. It was with this icon that Mikhail Romanov was blessed by his mother when he left for Moscow to claim the Russian throne. They say that just before the Revolution of 1917, the icon blackened so badly that the image was hardly visible; it was interpreted as a bad sign for the Romanov dynasty.
  The Ipatyevsky monastery survives mostly intact, with its 16th-century walls, towers, belfry, and the 17th-century cathedral.
  Apart from the monasteries, most of the city churches were either rebuilt or demolished during the Soviet years. The only city church that survives from the 17th-century "golden age" is the Resurrection church on the Lowlands (Russian: церковь Воскресения на Дебре). As the story goes, the church was commissioned by one merchant who ordered in England ten barrels of dye but received ten barrels of gold instead. He resolved that the unearned gold was the devil's gift and decided to spend it on building a church. Two other 17th-century temples, of rather conventional architecture, may be seen on the opposite side of the Volga.
  Among the vestiges of the Godunov rule, a fine tent-like church in the urban-type settlement of Krasnoye-na-Volge (formerly an estate of Boris Godunov's brother) may be recommended.
caption: Ipatiev Monastery gives its name to the Hypatian Codex of the Russian Primary Chronicle. Photo by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, 1911
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