Smolensk is one of Russia's oldest cities, sitting on the upper Dnieper River about 360 kilometres west-southwest of Moscow, close to the border with Belarus. Its position on the main east-west route across the European plain has made it a place of strategic importance — and catastrophic destruction — across twelve centuries. Smolensk has been sacked, besieged, burned, and fought over more times than almost any other city in Russia, and this history of violence is embedded in its landscape of fortifications, churches, and memorials.
The Smolensk Kremlin — more precisely the defensive city wall built in the early 17th century — is the city's defining landmark: a massive red-brick fortification nearly seven kilometres long with towers spaced along its entire length, one of the most impressive surviving medieval military structures in Russia. Within and around this wall, the city accumulated centuries of religious architecture: the Dormition Cathedral crowns Cathedral Hill with Baroque grandeur, while a scattering of small Romanesque-influenced churches built in the 12th and 13th centuries are among the oldest surviving religious buildings in Russia.
Smolensk suffered terribly in both 1812, when Napoleon's army fought a major battle here during the invasion, and in 1941-1943, when the German occupation reduced much of the city to ruins. The famous Katyn Forest, site of the Soviet massacre of Polish officers in 1940, is 20 kilometres to the west — a fact that gives the city a particularly heavy layer of historical weight. The 2010 Smolensk air disaster, in which the Polish president and 95 others died in a crash near the Katyn memorial site, added another.
Despite all this, Smolensk is a working city with a genuine character: the Dnieper divides it into halves connected by bridges, the old city wall provides a dramatic walking route, and the concentration of medieval and early modern architecture is extraordinary for a city this far from the tourist trail.