Michurinsk

Michurinsk is the district center of the Tambov region, located in the western part of the Oksko-Don plain 73 km northeast of Tambov. Its old name is Kozlov (renamed in 1932 in honor of I. V. Michurin, who lived here and worked since 1872). The population is 119,000 (2001). The city was founded in 1636 by decree of Tsar Mikhail Romanov as an earthen fortress on the Kozlovsky tract (near the camp of the Russian settler Semyon Kozlov). From the middle of the 17th century, Kozlov was a stronghold of defensive lines on the southern borders of Russia. In the 18th century, Kozlov developed as a commercial center of an agricultural district. It received city status in 1779. In 1865 a railway from Moscow was built and Kozlov became a railway junction. In the 19th century, trade and processing of agricultural raw materials developed in Kozlov. In the 20th century, auto-aggregate, instrument-making, locomotive repair plants were built. The central part of Michurinsk was formed at the end of the 19th century.
The architectural monuments include the Ilyinskaya Church (1781), probably built according to the project of V.V. Rastrelli; Bogolyubsky Cathedral (1783, architect K.A. Ton), which is a smaller copy of the Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The buildings of the Trinity Monastery founded in 1627 by Hieromonk Joseph Kozlovsky have practically not survived. The names of botanist V. M. Arnoldi, artist A. M. Gerasimov (there is a house-museum), electrical engineering A. N. Lodygin are associated with the history of Michurinsk. In 1832, the artist A. D. Nadezhdin opened in Kozlov the third school of drawing and painting in Russia. Writer K. A. Fedin, who studied at the Kozlovsky Commercial School, described Kozlov during the Civil War in the novel “Extraordinary Summer”. The history of the city is told by the expositions of the Michurinsky Museum of Local History, which contains rare books of the Trinity Monastery, objects of folk life, a collection of paintings. Michurinsk is known for found near the city sources of chloride-sodium mineral waters (water "Michurinskaya").