Bashkortostan
After leaving Kazan, our expedition is going to enter Russian „Stone Belt” - the Ural Mountains or exactly its last link – Southern Urals – the biggest part of which is covered with the forest and is the territory of the Republic of Bashkortostan.
Situated on different altitudes, Bashkiria is proud of variety of natural resources: sharp rises of the river banks and wide fields in between these, deep forests on the mountain hills and flowery grasslands at the foot, lakes formed from rivers and huge man made reservoirs. The republic is also rich of some other sorts of natural resources, the ones to make it an important industrial center, such as coal, ironstone, oil and gas. On the other hand, this is also the reason to create worries about the ecological state in the biggest towns of Bashkortostan.
After downfall of the Kazan Khanate which we already know from history of Tatarstan, in the 16th century, Bashkiria has voluntary joined Russia and asked Ivan Grozny (the Terrible) to raise a city to stay in. In 1574 the fortress protected with high hills near to the river Agidel was built. The name of it was Ufa: allegedly, this word comes from old Turkic „ufak” and means „tiny”. The history of the citadel as a city began in 1802 when the governor of the Orenburg province moved his residence here. This time also reconstruction of the city began: the narrow chaotic streets that grew around the main roads got enlarged and straightened in parallels with each other, beginning from the city center.
The statistical data, whether it’s exaggerated or not, are telling us that Russian, Tatar and Bashkir people are proportionally inhabiting the Republic of Bashkortostan. Two last of the nations mentioned above have a Turkic origin which assumes certain traditions, habits and language. However there are more than three nations populating the autonomy. Actually, there are more than hundred and this is why nations and cultures other from descendants of the nomads can be met here. Usually representatives of such nations as Udmurts and Modvins come together on some great cultural events and seldom appear in social life. More than a million of mixed inhabitants are living in Ufa, the capital of Bashkiria. In everyday life most used language here is Russian; as for Bashkir, it is offered along with Tatar as second language in most schools. However, it is largely used in the deepest sites of the republic.
The development of Ufa in the 20th century is very similar to that of the neighboring Chelyabinsk. Suddenly, it jumped far in the development during WWII when the city has hosted not only refugees from the other republics but also many plants from the European part of the USSR. At that time, in the after war period the Northern part of Ufa has begun to grow from the small settlement to a large industrial complex, which was very welcomed back then. Right now, flying over Ufa, birds and plane passengers are admiring a peculiar, sandglass-like shape of the city: being located at the peninsula and squeezed in between two rivers Ufa and Belaya (Agidel), it is divided in two parts – Northern one, which leaves an impression of a typical socialistic city and Southern that still keeps its history in its looks.
Leaving Ufa, our motorcyclists will have to cross the Urals not far from 1649 meters high Mount Jamantau. The oddest feature of these mountains is their difference between Eastern and Western sides: flat and easy in the West, they little by little turn into the hilly plain. However, in the East these hills are high and sheer. On the border of the East side of the Ural Mountains and West-Siberian plain is where the Chelyabinsk city, our next stop, lies.
Elizabete Neimiseva for enduroadventure.lv
Photos from http://virtualtourist.com