The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

390 RUSSIA IN EUROPE.amount annually to about 700,000 tons, valued at £5,000,000, and in the busyseasonthe boats are so crowded together that they form a regular bridge across theriver. As many as 100,000 boatmen and traders congregate in the summer in thisplace, whose chief industry is a large rope-walk.Taroslav, capital of the province, is probably the oldest Slav city founded onthe Volga, having been built in 102-j by the son of Vladimir the Great.Later onit became the rival of Tver and Moscow for Russian ascendancy in the north.Here a ferry connects the two sections of the Moscow-Vologda railway, which,combined with its cotton and linen spinning-mills, gives it more commercialimportance than it could hope to derive from the junction of the little riverKotorost. In its neighbourhood, and also on the Volga, is Sopelki, centre ofthe sect of " Wanderers."Rostov, lying to the south-west on the Moscow highway,and on a lake draining through the Kotorost to the Volga, is even an older placethan the present provincial capital. The chronicler Nestor mentions it as alreadyexisting in the time of Rurik, in the ninth century, and says that its firstinhabitants were Merians, a Slavonised race which, from the dawn of Russianhistory, occupied a vast territory in the present province of Smolensk as far as theLower Oka. Their name does not occur in the chronicles after the year 907, butthe Finnish element has left its traces in the local geographical nomenclature, andin the protracted opposition to Christianity, especially in Rostov, destined later onto become one of the metropolitan sees of Russia. To this position, which it hassince forfeited, it is indebted for the honour of ranking as a holy city, and one ofits chief industries is the painting of sacred images on enamel, which are forwardedto every part of the empire.Kostroma, capital of a province, was, like Rostov, an old city of the Merians,and its name is that of a Finnish god. The games of pagan origin, which recalledthe worship of Kostroma or Yarilo, have been abolished in the town ; but in manyrural districts straw figures are solemnly interred, rudely representing the hyperboreanAdonis, the god " who appears and dies," in order again to rise and perishperpetually. Kostroma, mentioned for the first time in the thirteenth century,became later on a very famous place, and the lofty towers and domes of its kremlstill recall the time when it was a princely residence. It was here that in 1613the States General announced to Michael Romanov his election to the throne afterthe expulsion of the Poles. He was then residing in the " Cathedral Monastery" of Hypatus (see Fig. 204), near the town founded in 1330 by a Tatar mirza,who had been converted by a "miraculous apparition." The convent has sincethen been twice rebuilt, in 1586 and 1650.At the junction of the TJnja the Volga resumes its southerly course to morepopulous regions, and soon approaches the city of Nijni-Novgorod.Basin of the Oka.(Governments of Orol, Kalcga, Tula, Moscow, Kazan, Vladimir, Tambov, and Nijni-Xovcorod.)The basin of this important river forms the true centre of European Russia, notonly geographically, but also in respect of population and industrial activity. Here